Terrified! Invisible Super Admin

By “I never saw that 2nd super admin” do you mean to say that WP is reporting two super admins, but only listing one name?

yes

Edit: come to think about it, i recently did lost some random data (like plugin suddenly reset itself, like a post lost, stuff).

Sounds like DB corruption.

Go optomize your DB.

optimize? what does that imply exactly?

It cleans up DB caching and tidies tables. Also run a DB repair while you’re in there. Both can be done via PHPmyAdmin, and they’re pretty common things. I automate mt DBs to optimize regularly.

Sorry for the late reply, I haven’t had time to do it. I just optimized the tables now, but the invisible admin is still there…. So what now?

Do you have backups you can compare with?

Unfortunately, I only have backup for a week. Nor does my hosting company keep backup for very long either.

I noticed this issue this morning as well. You should double check the users table in your database just to be sure, but from what I found in my install it appears to be a bug reporting the superfluous super admin.

I just upgraded my network install this week. I have a test site setup, and there are only 5 user accounts. There were 6, but I deleted one of the test accounts.

I noticed that I’m still showing 6 users and 2 super admins. There should be 5 users and 1 super admin. I don’t know what it was before I upgraded, or before I deleted the user account.

What I do know is that when I look at the users table I only show 5 users, and when I do a query to get the user Ids from the users meta table, I only get the 5 distinct Ids.

So my conclusion is that it’s a bug in WordPress reporting the wrong data, or we’ve been hacked by a hacker with some super amazing skills, but I’m betting on it being a bug ??

Really, that’s interesting… I’ve had to setup/destroy a few testing accounts in my WP installation and all of those went well (as in the number changed correctly). Where could’ve the bug be originating from?

Ok… I just found the function call WP/Network is calling to get the super admins, and it’s a zero indexed array. The dump on the result is showing me and the 0 index. There is no 0 user ??

Array
(
[0] =>
[1] => marion
)

After more investigation I found that the get_super_admins() function is getting cached data from the sitemeta table. The data stored for my super admins includes the zero index.

site_admins = a:2:{i:0;N;i:1;s:6:”marion”;}

I also found a row in the sitemeta for user_count = 6… so that explains my issue. I changed the user_count to 5, and it’s now showing the correct count. This explains why my numbers aren’t exactly like yours.

So the bottom line is that WordPress did a really smart thing and cached this data, but there’s no check when it returns the data to the screen to remove a bogus user.

I also noticed that there are a few keys in the sitemeta table with the suffix _ts like the user_count_ts. The value is a number, and I’m guessing this is the transient timestamp value and after enough time passes it will update the data.

Just to let you know, I noticed an invisible super admin as well in my network. So it might be something that happens quite regularly, possibly when an user has been deleted or its privileges modified.