Wp_usermeta table cluttered with “ecs_instalation” (sic) keys

  • Hello, everyone!

    I’m hoping to get some insight on an odd issue that *may* be contributing to a site-breaking bug for some of our users.

    The context is that after upgrading to PHP 8.0, a subset of our users began experiencing a totally broken version of our site (layout completely destroyed on front-end, Page Source missing thousands of lines of HTML, including the closing </body> tag, etc.). We’ve downgraded to 7.4, which has temporarily fixed the issue, but I’m still trying to get to the root cause.

    And I don’t know if this is it, but I’ve noticed that for all of our users experiencing this issue, the wp_usermeta table is cluttered with hundreds of iterations of the entries like the following:

    {"umeta_id":"264186","user_id":"1229","meta_key":"ecs_instalation","meta_value":"1645654611"}

    That is, user 1229, one of our affected users, has hundreds of lines like this in the User Meta table, with slightly different umeta_id and meta_value values.

    I did a Google search for meta_key “ecs_instalation” (and yes, there’s only one L in the actual table), but nothing came up.

    Any ideas? Even if this isn’t the cause of the site-breaking PHP issue, I’d like to know what’s spamming our usermeta table and why.

    Thanks!
    Tashi

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    Do you have any plugins where “ECS” might be related to the plugin name?

    Thread Starter tashi1es

    (@tashi1es)

    Oh goodness — how did I not think of this? I even googled to find out what “ECS” might mean, but didn’t think to check our list of plugins. Indeed, we have a plugin called “Ele Custom Skin”, an add-on by Dudaster to the Elementor page-builder plugin. I’ll make a post in their support forum.

    Thank you for asking the question I should have, Steven!

    • This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by tashi1es.
    Thread Starter tashi1es

    (@tashi1es)

    …and I’ve just found that disabling the Ele Custom Skin plugin does indeed fix the “PHP 8.0 breaks site for certain users” issue. Hopefully the plugin devs will have some insight, though their response rate in the plugin forum is not encouraging. Still, major progress to have positively identified the plugin causing the issue. Thanks again, Steven!

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