MarkOlbert

Your analogy to google is off target: your documentation is simply inadequate to the task of getting the plugin working. That is no doubt due to the complexity of what the plugin is attempting to do…but the point of software development, ultimately, is not to just do cool things but to do cool things in a way that is reasonably straightforward for the end user to achieve. That makes documentation an important (but often overlooked or minimized) component of any software tool.

What constitutes an end user is inherently amorphous. Are we targeting sysadmins with 20+ years of experience running commercial WordPress hosting sites, intermediate-level users (like me) who have a good bit of personal (but not commercial scale) experience setting up and running WordPress sites or a rank novice?

I’m willing to believe your plugin and documentation is fine for that first group. The other two? Not in its current state.

Some further information…

The algorithm you’re using to score right/wrong questions is quite odd, and perhaps broken.

I added template variables to display points scored and correct points scored to the result pages. Picking an incorrect answer causes both of those variables having the value 0, which makes sense.

But picking the correct answer sets points scored to 0 and correct points scored to 100. Since the filtering mechanism used to assign result pages to different scores only offers points scored, all answers, right or wrong, are considered the same.

Thanx, Sumit.

I now suspect the problem was caused by another plugin, W3 Total Cache, which is an aggressive caching system, so aggressive in fact that it causes all sorts of subtle problems with both the site and with other plugins. I say this because a number of problems not involving QSM disappeared when I deleted it, and QSM re-installed smoothly and appears to be functioning properly.

If this new experience holds after continued usage of QSM (I’m currently wrestling with linking different result pages to different outcomes on a simple multi-choice right/wrong quiz) I will of course revise/update my rating for QSM to be positive.

That worked, thanx.

You might want to update your documentation, as I don’t recall seeing that tidbit and dollar signs are not all that uncommon in text.

LOL! So I fire the QSM editor up on a different computer — same site — and, amazingly, it starts working without any error messages. What in the world? Something gets set on install that doesn’t get set on ordinary usage?

Some further details…

I deleted that first quiz and recreated it. I went through the three steps of the creation wizard. When it handed me off to the creation/editing page the message “Error: Not Found! Please try again.” was displayed (as well as the spinning wheel icon I referred to before).

Following the Microsoft standard for error messages — which basically boils down to “something went wrong, but we won’t tell you anything about why it did” is neither helpful nor good programming practice. If something went wrong >>tell the user something about what went wrong<<!

You now have all the information I have about why your plugin doesn’t work. I look forward to your response.

And please, don’t tell me to do the “oh, it must be an interaction with another plugin, deactivate stuff until the problem goes away”. It’s far, far easier for me to just toss your plugin in the trash and move on to something else (I’ll end this segment of my response by urging you guys, as WP plugin developers, to >>urge the WP architectural team to greatly enhance the debugging/plugin interaction aspect of WP — I suspect that will entail a serious bit of redesign, but it’s desperately needed given the fact that WP sites use plugins from all over the place).

How do I delete anything stored in the database? I do have access to the site via command line (it’s a VPS) and am reasonably proficient in linux (Debian) and doing basic editing in mysql.

I’m also confused — and I hope you’re concerned — that somehow installing one plugin (Quiz Cat) got me two. I’ve never, ever run into anything like that before, despite using WordPress for quite a number of years.

I doubt that either of your theories are correct, for the simple reason that another duplicator plugin, Duplicate Page (which also duplicates posts, too) had no problem duplicating everything I threw at it. Plus, it has some additional features (even in the free version) which were quite nice. I strongly recommend people try it.

I’ve talked to my hosting provider, and he is as confused as I am.

Then again, that’s because I’m also the hosting provider :). The site runs on a VPS I rent.

I’m reasonably proficient with Debian, so if there are diagnostics you’d like me to run, send them along.

Sorry about the delay in replying.

I cannot select Memcached (I’d upload a screenshot but I don’t see how to do that on a reply). The Memcached option in the dropdown is under “Multiple Servers”, which doesn’t fit my situation (the WordPress site and memcached are running on the same server).

No offense, but the problem may well be that the instructions you guys provided for installing memcached are pretty complicated, somewhat unclear, and aren’t based on debian systems, which is what I’m using.

Do you have command line diagnostics I can run to see if some required component is missing and keeping memcache from working correctly with your plugin? I know it’s running (as per the info I provided earlier) so I think the problem is some part of the “glue” between memcache and your plugin is missing or not configured correctly. But I have no idea what that might be.

Thanx for the detailed reply. Here’s what I found based on your suggestions. FYI, I had to manually create a link to memcached-tools because the debian install package doesn’t do that for some reason.

> memcached-tool 127.0.0.1:11211 display
  #  Item_Size  Max_age   Pages   Count   Full?  Evicted Evict_Time OOM

> ps afux | grep memc
mark     27377  0.0  0.0   7796   828 pts/0    S+   21:11   0:00              \_ grep memc
memcache 25108  0.0  0.0 408164  1040 ?        Ssl  Dec08   0:15 /usr/bin/memcached -m 64 -p 11211 -u memcache -l 127.0.0.1 -P /var/run/memcached/memcached.pid

memcached-tool 127.0.0.1:11211 stats

#127.0.0.1:11211   Field       Value
         accepting_conns           1
               auth_cmds           0
             auth_errors           0
                   bytes           0
              bytes_read          66
           bytes_written        1998
              cas_badval           0
                cas_hits           0
              cas_misses           0
               cmd_flush           0
                 cmd_get           0
                 cmd_set           0
               cmd_touch           0
             conn_yields           0
   connection_structures           2
   crawler_items_checked           0
       crawler_reclaimed           0
        curr_connections           1
              curr_items           0
               decr_hits           0
             decr_misses           0
             delete_hits           0
           delete_misses           0
         direct_reclaims           0
          evicted_active           0
       evicted_unfetched           0
               evictions           0
       expired_unfetched           0
             get_expired           0
             get_flushed           0
                get_hits           0
              get_misses           0
              hash_bytes      524288
       hash_is_expanding           0
        hash_power_level          16
               incr_hits           0
             incr_misses           0
                libevent 2.1.8-stable
          limit_maxbytes    67108864
     listen_disabled_num           0
        log_watcher_sent           0
     log_watcher_skipped           0
      log_worker_dropped           0
      log_worker_written           0
       lru_bumps_dropped           0
     lru_crawler_running           0
      lru_crawler_starts       13260
  lru_maintainer_juggles       81416
       lrutail_reflocked           0
            malloc_fails           0
         max_connections        1024
           moves_to_cold           0
           moves_to_warm           0
        moves_within_lru           0
                     pid       25108
            pointer_size          64
               reclaimed           0
    rejected_connections           0
            reserved_fds          20
           rusage_system    7.801194
             rusage_user    8.117724
   slab_global_page_pool    0
slab_reassign_busy_deletes    0
slab_reassign_busy_items    0
slab_reassign_chunk_rescues 0
slab_reassign_evictions_nomem 0
slab_reassign_inline_reclaim 0
   slab_reassign_rescues     0
   slab_reassign_running     0
             slabs_moved     0
                 threads     4
                    time  1670620338
time_in_listen_disabled_us   0
       total_connections     5
             total_items     0
              touch_hits     0
            touch_misses     0
                  uptime     81379
                 version     1.5.6

BTW, I enabled Object Cache in General Settings, but hadn’t done that earlier because the only option I was allowed to select from the corresponding Object Cache Method dropdown was “Disk”…which seemed wrong, since I was trying to set up memcached (which I could not select from the dropdown).

Does the Disk option for Object Cache mean memcached is being used? Or is the fact that’s the only option I can select mean something is wrong in the installation or configuration?

I think my problem wasn’t your plugin, it was the fact I was caching the site using WP Super Cache.

My apologies.

For the benefit of anyone else running into a similar problem…

The problem was caused by WP Cerber, another plugin, being configured to instantly blacklist any IP that specifically requested access to wp-login.php.

Unfortunately, the normal logout process >>requires<< that wp-login.php be called, leading to a conflict.

Reverting that WP Cerber setting solved the problem.

Sadly, I couldn’t agree more. But I’m stuck with it, because several other plugins I depend on depend on it.

To clarify further:

The image I am trying to upload is at https://pursuit.olbert.com/wp-content/uploads/moto/2022-09/mt-whitney.png. You can confirm it is publicly accessible by following that link.

It is a supported file type (png).

It is less than 500KB in size.

Looks to me like there’s a problem in your code someplace.