Ouch! There was a server error. Clearing cache doesn't solve

i just checked your form at https://chocbox.fionastoreydesign.co.uk/.
and there was no server error. retry message. You may need to clear your cache fully

your form was not slow on my end btw

Thanks sean1975 but I have tried deleting the cache and it still shows at my end! I have also reactivated the popup on https://www.chocolateboxcoaching.co.uk and am still getting the error – see screenshot at https://www.chocolateboxcoaching.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/quickformerror.jpg

i just tested using firefox and no error message. the first test was on chrome. i think the issue may be on your end.

I don’t see an error message either. So as suggested it looks like a problem at your end.

Have you tried using a different browser?

I am getting the same error on IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome!

It’s still a caching issue.

Some ISPs cache websites which is why you are seeing issues.

As only you can see the error message. Can you ask a relation who has a different ISP to check the site.

And completely delete the plugin, wait 24 hours and then install again – that will hopefully have cleared your ISP cache.

Our production site runs on a virtual machine hosted by Linode. We also have a development site which runs on a virtual machine on a computer in our home. Both versions of our site use the same theme, plugins, etc. When I tried upgrading from 6.10.2 to 6.11, quick contact form worked as expected on the development machine, but it displays the server error message described by others on the production machine.

Since we control the virtual machine that’s hosted by Linode, I don’t think the problems is due to the ISP caching our website. Any other changes that we make to the site take effect in real time.

Since we are using the same theme on both our production and development sites, I also don’t see how the theme can be to blame. I would think the same thing would be true of the plugins that we are using since they are installed on both sites.

Without seeing the site it’s not possible to give a meaningfull answer.

When everyone tested the chocolateboxcoaching form it worked. The only person who had an issue was Fionder. This indicated a local caching issue. If it was anything else everyone would have had the same problem.

Note however that the plugin uses Ajax. for some bizarre reason WordPress has hidden this in the wp-admin folder. If you have blocked access to this folder the form may not work properly.

I checked permissions on both our development and productions sites. In both sites (running on Linux) the permissions for wp-admin are set to 755 with the owner being my personal login account. When I checked my wp-config.php file, there was one difference between the two sites. The development site (where 6.11 works) has define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT',false);, while the production site (where 6.10.2 works, but 6.11 produces a server error message) has define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT',true);. I couldn’t see why this would make any difference to the Quick Contact Form plugin, but just to rule this out I set the constant to false on the production machine. Sadly, this did not eliminate the problem.

Since the 6.11 update produces an error message, I rolled back the plugin to the 6.10.2 version which seems to serve us well. If there is some data that I can get from the site with the updated plugin, I would be happy to do so during a low volume time for our site. Just say what information needs to be checked.

I mention in passing that when I run the 6.10.2 version, the form content fills the content area for my web page as would be expected. However, when I run the 6.11 version (even on the development site where no error messages are produced), the width has narrowed to be 280px wide. Inspecting quick form element (6.11 version), I found the following information using the console.

• The value “device-width;” for key “width” is invalid, and has been ignored.
• The value “1.0;” for key “initial-scale” was truncated to its numeric prefix.
• The value “1.0;” for key “maximum-scale” was truncated to its numeric prefix.
• The value “0;” for key “user-scalable” was truncated to its numeric prefix.
• Error parsing a meta element’s content: ‘;’ is not a valid key-value pair separator. Please use ‘,’ instead.

All the above information was attributed to index-13, which was: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;">

With respect to your plugin the console also told me: Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) This was with respect to https://192.168.1.7/wp-content/plugins/quick-contact-form/images/failure.png Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) So it could be I was supposed to see some sort of image indicating that there was some sort of error, but since the image wasn’t found, it wasn’t presented.

Using the terminal I looked into the directory quick-contact-form. It has no subdirectory images. When I looked to see what images were local to the quick-contact-form directory, there were only three GIFs, screenshots one, two, and three. There is a subdirectory assets which is empty.

The failure image was something I played with for a while but have now got rid of in V6.11

The 280px width is the default if you set the style to fixed. Maybe a setting got lost in the install.

Neither of these will give you the ‘Ouch’ message. The ‘Ouch’ message only displays if there is an Ajax issue. I don’t know enough about Ajax to give you a meaningful answer as everything you see in the plugin was created (mostly) by guesswork and a lot of Googling.

As an aside, settings the 755 permission won’t help is access to ajax is blocked. This is normally don’t in your htaccess.

So I’m not sure what to suggest we try next. The plugin is working just fine for thousands of users so it’s not a common problem.

I am not blocking access to wp-admin with my .htaccess.

I can use the built-in web developer’s console of my browser to see which JQuery is loading. According to my console, both my development and production sites are loading this version of JQuery into my browser:

JQMIGRATE: Migrate is installed, version 1.4.0 | jquery-migrate.min.js:2

Is this the version that you were expecting?

In passing I’ll note that my sites both use the following plugin to email the user messages created by Quick Contact Form: WP Mail SMTP. This has worked nicely with your plugin for previous versions, and still appears to work with 6.11 on our development machine. I have it configured to use SMTP with the SMTP host being smtp.gmail.com

Like I said, I have no idea why it’s not working on the live site. The fact that it’s working on the development server but not the production server suggests it’s a server issue not the plugin.

The ‘Ouch’ message appears before the form is processed so won’t be affected by the SMTP plugin. So I just don’t know. Can you email me a link to the live site with V6.11 installed so I can do some diagnosis.

Incidentally, you don’t the SMTP plugin. QCF has a builtin SMTP – it’s on the ‘Send Options’ page.