hdinin

I appreciate the clarification. Somehow I was directed to this page for support. Must be that imbecile factor, or maybe, I’d see more clearly what the guideline is, if you could parse this sentence, which seems salient, from the forum guideline page:

“For support of commercial themes or plugins, go to the official support channel.”

I take it to mean, the support channel of the vendor who has commercialized the product… With all due respect, and as a sometime teacher of rhetoric, may I suggest this be spelled out more succinctly and in any greater detail as to clarify which channels are “official” in this context?

Also, I gather, “premium” means there is a fee attached that is due periodically to stay current. I understand that. But how do I determine a product is not “premium?” I mean from what are sometimes the same vendors?

I am solicited for money to pay for products and services from WordPress itself. I gather these are their “premium” products and there is a separate support channel for them.

I hope you understand my confusion, and the perception of the general lack of clarity. I’m afraid all these sites, both WordPress (which I’ll call foundational) and commercial product vendors, need an incredibly large amount of help making themselves understandable to the laymen, who, I am guessing, make up the preponderance of the user base. Good luck…

Thanks again for your help.

Same user (hdinin) posting again… A minute after posting, I decided to look at the offending “already existing” destination folder on my site server, via ftp.

It was there all right, and had dates stamped (including internal sub-folders) dating back two years. I took the radical step of deleting this folder and all content. And I returned to the site dashboard and, again, tried to install the “missing” copy of YoastSEO needed for “Premium” to function. This time the installation worked, and all is up to par now.

I, of course, don’t understand what caused the problem. I used to call this computer housekeeping. I don’t understand why Yoast do not have a means of taking care of this automatically with the release of obviously major upgrades to the plugins. Why was this “destination folder” allowed to persist?

Thanks for any other assistance.

Thanks. I thought of that, which is why I checked the other WP installation at the same host. But I know these domains are not on the same server, so I’ll check with them.

This makes sense. Thank you James.

I’m an end user. I got this pHp requires updating warning, and promptly went into ControlPanel on my host (bluehost) and, using phpConfig, updated the version being used to 7.1 (from the previous 5.4.3). Yet the warning persists. That looks like a bug to me. I admit to being an ignoramus, but I’ve done this on other WP blog sites, without a problem, including another bluehost hosted site.

Please fix this.

It occurs to me that perhaps I should add that the WordPress blog to which I am importing these posts has a completely different name and URL…

https://1standarddeviation.com

Thank you.

Oh that tag </rss> is not the problem.

There’s probably quite a bit of junk after it (correct me if I’m wrong) that is the problem.

I’d be very surprised if there isn’t a whole bunch of URLs and other spurious content, some of it pretty raunchy, that someone has hung on the end of your html on the site itself. It can’t be seen because it’s had its overflow parameter set to “hidden.”

I’ve been struggling with this for well over either months, and no satisfaction is to be found here…

I have my ISP host working on the problem now. Either there is a weakness in some of the WP code that generates the blog, and allows a hacker to insert code that plucks the spurious stuff from its source and sticks it in your html, or there’s a weakness elsewhere.

My host is web.com, but I have no other similar problem with my stuff (for two domains) hosted by them, so I suspect WordPress, but they ain’t talkin’

I just checked the source on your current blog entries, and it looks pretty clean, so it would appear your problem went away.

Let me know what you may have found out to help make it go away.

Thanks.

Howard

Incidentally, I checked the database using phpMyAdmin on my host’s own site, and there is no sign of the corrupt feed code…

H

Moshu

Thanks.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Your explanation confirms what I understood (about the feed being created on the fly). I’m not an idiot, just ignorant of what I’d rather not have cluttering my mind.

As the “new” blog worked perfectly well for several days, in terms of providing a “valid” feed, the hack has to be in the old content I’ve slowly been adding back in as individual posts, which was pure text, as far as I can tell, from a backup of these previous posts. Unless it was sneaked in in the form of html tags, which I assume is possible, but seems unlikely.

Therefore I have to conclude that somehow WordPress is susceptible to these kinds of hacks. I remember when I first encountered this someone commenting on how quickly the new release (of WP) had been hacked, in my case.

I have two domains hosted by this ISP, and they are a pain in the butt with regard to solving problems that arise, but they have never been guilty of leaving my content susceptible to hacks of this sort. The only variable is WordPress software, which had to have been installed corrupted (at the source) or has design flaws which allow it to occur.

Sorry man, that’s how it looks to me.

I’ll see if anyone responds to my call for help and the contact info I provided, or if I can get my hosting service to clean this up.

Thanks again.

Howard

Moshu

Thanks for the advice. I wasn’t soliciting bids. I was asking for help and an explanation. That seems clear enough.

I’ll accept that all you can or care to provide is a perfectly legitimate rule here. Your comment about moving a corrupt database is gratuitous.

As for the database being corrupted, that’s not what I understood to be the case. It could be I’m simply too ignorant, which I accept. But I understood it was the *feed* that was corrupt. I still don’t understand where that is stored…

As for a contact address, that’s easy: [email protected]

Thanks again.

Howard

Oh, and whooami…

How can you tell the feed has been exploited? Did you try to subscribe to the feed and see something? What did you look at?

And I checked the blog pages… No sign of these magicplants.co.uk URLs or that site.

All of this corrupt code is at the very end of the feed, which is why I suspected Feedburner…

Howard

Sorry for the bitched up line spaces in the response above.

Just to be clear… It’s obvious there’s a problem.

How do I fix it? I’m happy to be part of what may become a fascinating thread, but I would like to fix this feed for the sake of my readers.

I will alert my hosting service, but PLEASE, how do I access the source feed, and how do I fix it?

Incidentally, though I’m comfortable with Web design, I’m not a blog junkie or deeply into the arcana of this stuff. Even something as simple as a reference to “OP” stops me until I figure it out. That one is easy, some of the other things on these forums is impenetrable.

I’m really productive with plain straight forward English. Sorry for any innate imposition thereby.

Thanks.

Howard

Only the last response begins to help me. I suspected it was hacked, but I don’t know how. They were awfully quick about it. The feed I replaced at the same time as the upgrade, which, incidentally was performed on:

Friday 2008 May 23

also was similarly corrupted, with the names of URLs of

completely other blogs

, including a blog with the name JohnCusack in the URL, but I would have no idea when that occurred.

whooami relates “fixing” a hacked feed. What do I do to fix mine, short of deleting the feed, and starting again, though this obviously leaves me exposed to more hacking.

The host in this case is Interland, aka, Web.com. They have been the host for another Website of mine (no blog) and that has never been hacked, in years.

Thanks for any help. I’d still like some answers to my basic questions.

Where

is the source feed code actually located, and how do I access it? All the Feedburner, Validator, etc. references imply that source feed code is editable. But

how

?

I’m not embarrassed to admit my ignorance, or have it eradicated.

Howard

Thanks for the reply. I’ve been traveling and just saw your response. In fact, despite my avowed ignorance, I know enough to have looked at the php script and saw that there was no line 165, so my mystification was only deeper. I finally solved the problem (in any event it went away) by updating to 2.5. The new installation seemed to solve whatever was causing this strange message, and also, more importantly, permitted me once again to login to my own blog…

Howard