Summer

I had tried disabling them and re-enabling them that entire week, but no change, every site did a backup as 2am, then again at 3am on their scheduled days. Every day for each site that whole week.

What did change was the passage of time LOL. The new backups that started on the following week, this week, went back to one backup per site, as normal. I watched the backups scheduled all week this week, and they were back to one per site again.

So, I’m now even more confused, but I thought you should know the problem (whatever it was) resolved itself.

Too weird LOL

I have rebooted Chrome several times, and my laptop twice, and Wordfence still will not let me configure it, each and every time throwing that “pages not responding” error.

I will keep working on the site, and try again after the content has been added, but I have no idea why this one single site is doing this.

Hi Peter,

I don’t have access to any useful logs that I can see, a limitation of Dreamhost? Anyway, one thing I did discover while rebuilding the Media library is that there was a hack of some sort, so I’m wondering if they managed to corrupt WF while trying to plant their spammy hidden HTML/CSS code (links to p*rn in Arabic hidden in the menu, how weirdly niche).

I’m also wondering if that code had been there a while, because the site started responding a touch faster after I removed those links. But they never showed up in scans or were flagged by Wordfence, which again, maybe disabling WF to prevent it from raising flags was the purpose?

I’m planning on reactivating WF this evening, after another external scan says the site is clean, and hope that it works. None of my other sites running WF have done anything close to this, ever.

I honestly don’t know how long those spammy links were in there, nor why so much of the site was deleted when WF crashed, or during the first restore of the site from DH Support.

Either way, another few scans are planned, as well as a hosting move. Thanks for at least looking into whether you could help.

Simply FYI: with one site increasing to over 1.5Mb of log entries per day and known spam slipping through, I’ve chosen to downgrade back to v4.10.2 again and see how that works.

No, this issue still exists. I have been adjusting the settings like you suggested, but so far, nothing has helped. Some sites get more traffic (and spam traffic) than others, but the behavior is the same across the board.

Should I email you the list of plugins and theme(s) that are in use across the sites still having problems? Most of them are similar, running on Genesis with different child themes, and a handful of Genesis plugins.

I’ll try to explain a little better, I see I wasn’t clear about what I’m seeing.

When you click on “Comments” in the admin area, the default view is All Comments, with links to see Pending, Approved, and Spam.

Right now, Antispam Bee is letting all spam through, where they sit as Pending approval. No incoming spam at all is being marked as Spam by the plugin. I had meant to say they were all being held as Pending, and not being flagged as Spam. I apologize for that confusion.

When I check the comments on my sites, spam comments and regular comments are all just highlighted as pending approval. Comments that are spam are not being flagged as such by ASB. I have to manually go through and either click Spam or Delete Permanently.

I had thought that Antispam Bee flagged a comment as spam, I would not see it as Pending, just in Spam. If you’re saying that ASB never separated legit comments that were pending approval from spam comments that were automatically sent to Spam, that’s the behavior I’m trying to find again.

So to summarize, Antispam Bee is not flagging comments as spam on my sites anymore, but my other comment controls are just holding them as Pending until I manually mark them as Spam. ASB is not recognizing comments I’ve already marked as Spam, and I’ve had to start collecting IP addresses to prevent them from leaving comments in order to slow the bursts down.

I have not used Jetpack ever, stopped using Akismet 10 years ago, and don’t use Disqus, so those aren’t conflicting.

Does that make it clearer the behavior I’m seeing now?

Did configuration behavior change, then? Or maybe I’m confusing Antispam Bee with another plugin? I had thought that in previous versions (some time in 2018 maybe?), the items flagged as spam were also moved to Spam, not flagged as spam and left in the main comments.

I thought that “Mark as Spam, Do Not Delete” flagged the items as Spam and moved them to the Spam section, where I could go through at my leisure and see if anything had been flagged with a false positive. That’s the behavior I prefer, especially give the wacky increase in spam bombing the past few months.

Every few months, there will be bursts of a few hundred comments over a couple of days, and those are flagged but not moved to Spam. So I have to scroll through main comments to move the spam, instead of scrolling through Spam and bulk deleting quickly.

Am I mistaken in thinking that Antispam Bee previously flagged & moved the spam comments? That it only ever just flagged them?

Yes! The readability of the File Size and Duration fields are 200% better now.

There’s another glitch I’m seeing, the “Season” field is now default “1”, for ALL episodes, and I think that was introduced with the 8.2.1 update (it wasn’t there in the 8.2 update).

We have a bunch of shows that span 10-plus years and 600-plus episodes… I don’t think “1” should be default for “Season”, and deleting it doesn’t stick… any way to make that an empty field again?

After the hotfix, there’s still a major glitch in the File Size and Duration fields display.

Both the file size and duration fields are split (not on the same line), and because of how they are split, they line up with the “Auto detect” radio buttons.

It’s a very confusing layout, how they line up can cause some readability confusion until you figure out what you’re actually looking at ??

the seconds box appears below the hours/minutes box, and is aligned with the “Auto detect duration” radio button… it took me all day to figure out what that number was and why it was placed where it currently sits.

Hey Angelo,

All of the sites are using the latest versions of WordPress, v5.3.2, and v 1.5 of the Classic Editor plugin by “WordPress Contributors”. Also using both Firefox and Chrome (latest versions).

If you need any screenshots, just ask ??

Well, that’s more than a little short-sighted on Google’s part, given how popular comic books and graphic novels and the many movies & TV shows based on them are these days. Manga, too.

Someone really should point that out to them.

Anyway, thanks again!

Hi Angelo!

This isn’t a new migration… this is a cleanup of sites that have been around a long time, and the hope is that cleaning up the old data will get rid of some DB problems that exist, affecting site performance.

All these sites have been using Powerpress exclusively for 5-7 years, and are running current versions of WordPress and other plugins. There’s been no podPress presence in at least that long.

Those instructions say that Migrate only works when both Powerpress and podPress are active, which is something that literally cannot happen anymore because of podPress’ age (will not run on WP 3.x or newer). The instructions also indicate that in the case of podPress being unavailable, the process is to use Import instead.

I had started the Import process, just to see what it would give me, and it does display a LOT of errors, saying I need to create multiple new custom feeds before I can continue because many of the posts have multiple enclosures (which they shouldn’t)… and since creating additional feeds is not an option, I abandoned the import.

I don’t have access to phpMyadmin on these sites, so I’m kinda flying with half a wing trying to fix this.

The other problem is that even with some sort of automated update of the old podPress data, there are still a lot of episodes that have podPress data that aren’t being read by Powerpress anymore, and those posts are just “missing” the podcast data.

They just disappeared after a recent update (not sure if it was a WordPress or Powerpress or ACF update, but the players were there one day, then the next day, over 100 episodes no longer had players or any media enclosure data at all).

Yes, most of the episodes throwing errors about multiple enclosures are ones we’ve gone in and manually added the media data to Powerpress after the episode disappearances, to get them active again in the meantime. Which seems to suggest that the podPress data may still be in there, and us adding the Powerpress data to a post that LOOKS like it has no media data caused the errors about multiple enclosures… or something.

Is it possible to create a filter or other code snippet to make the podpress fields visible? That could resolve a lot of what I’m fighting against here… it would allow me to see the data when I’m editing the episode, so I can copy the data over to the Powerpress metabox, then also delete those fields from inside the post to clear them out once I’ve finished the data copy.

Hi Shawn,

unfortunately, that document isn’t a helpful guide anymore because it requires podPress to be an installed and active plugin to do the migrations. podPress is not installed on those sites, and likely hasn’t been for more than 7 years, possibly longer.

iirc, podpress became incompatible when WordPress versions 2.5-2.7 came out (somewhere in there), and was eventually removed from the WordPress Plugin repository with a year of that for no longer being maintained or supported.

That means that podPress would not work with WordPress 5.x, even if it could be downloaded from someplace safe & secure to even try ??

I will try to collect some more data so I can better ask my questions via the Contact form. I don’t have access to the databases for those sites, but I know what to ask the admins to query for that podPress data.

Thanks, will give the wildcard version a try… there have been way too many domains used to keep a manageable list of them.

Cool, I never knew that widget was there. I’ve been using custom html widget to display the icons of various platforms, because I could never find anything that had all of them.

Any chance of adding Player.FM subscribe links to the page/widget in future versions?