Mysterious wp:meta_key fields (dozens)

  • Ever since I upgraded to WP 2.8.x, my New Post page is terribly sluggish because dozens, maybe even hundreds of numerically named Custom Fields have appeared there. The content is cryptic but obviously variations on the same theme. This is what a sample looks like when viewed in an export file:

    <wp:postmeta>
<wp:meta_key>41347</wp:meta_key>
<wp:meta_value>wpAjax33f82191628f3f8bbaff215ee461093b0328b0a66f526cb3c491097f062e0bc496df3eb99b37be1f9e7d7e81c1157884</wp:meta_value>
</wp:postmeta>

    I’ve found nothing on this except a couple of instances where people have posed a similar question with no response. Does anyone have a clue about what has caused this or what it is? I started to delete them but it would take hours through the sluggish interface. It’s almost unusable at this point.

    Thanks for any help.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • Have you tried:

    – deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem? If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).

    – resetting the plugins folder by FTP or phpMyAdmin? Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems.

    Thread Starter davidrahrer

    (@davidrahrer)

    Thanks for the suggestion, esmi. I think I did something similar before, but I just tried as you suggested and the fields are still there when I go to create a new post even with all plugins deactivated. The fields also get saved with the posts.

    If I could be sure they were useless, I might try to delete them from the db manually, but I would like to get to the bottom of the cause to prevent it in the future. It has made posting almost impossible.

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter davidrahrer

    (@davidrahrer)

    I finally deleted all 7645 rows from wp_postmeta that started with “wpAjax.” I wish I knew more about what they were. The rest of the lines after wpAjax appear to have been encrypted strings, but I’ve been unable to find anything else out. I’m assuming that a plugin created them at some point, but I hope they weren’t important. At least I can create a post now.

    If anyone knows more, I would still like to hear about it.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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