Michael King

Well hello – the penny has dropped! After I realized I could select multiple blocks, one of those little voices in my head said “what happens if you just use CMD-C/CMD-V like any copy/paste?”

So I tried that – bingo, my problem is solved! The answer was truly hiding in plain sight all along. I still wonder why it’s not better documented, but I can live with it now that I know the basic answer. Still not clear how I would apply this method to a single block, but that’s easy to solve via other means.

Thanks Joy!

Thanks @joyously – nice to hear I’m not completely foolish.

Actually, I didn’t even know you could select multiple blocks, but now that I know, I don’t know what the use of that would be, unless it’s just to know the word count???

Probably beyond my technical skills to develop a fix, and I certainly don’t have time for that – I’ll have to depend on the skill & generosity of others.

Appears that something in my (non-Automatticc) Theme is creating a bunch of error messages that are gumming up the works. Could also be something about caching, as I’m very well supplied with that and it’s creating some other problems.

I think I can call this resolved.

I’m still experimenting to be sure but I think I have my problem fixed. My hosting company theorized it was a database cache issue (I assume they had some reason to think that but they didn’t share). As it turns out, if I PURGE DATABASE CACHE right after activating this or any other plugin, then I get the correct outcome.

With that in hand, Redirection p/i is now happily re-routing some retired pages to an appropriate place.

@citeweb Your issue and mine now appear to be very different – I’m going to mark this thread RESOLVED and suggest you start your own thread.

Thanks!

Ummm….that explainer didn’t really say what goes wrong, nor why we need a plugin that makes WordPress do what WordPress is supposed to do to begin with.

Based on that, however, I have dropped a trouble ticket on my hosting company about the issue. Will be interesting to see what they say – probably something like “delete everything on your site, make sure all plugins on all WP sites in the entire universe are up to date, and try it again,” followed by “it’s a user error.”

Thanks @sterndata

Well this is embaeassing for me but good news for @johnny5 – I installed a different redirect plugin and got the same wont-activate behavior

I guess I will go bitch at my hosting company, or I don’t know what.

@johnny5 What error log? Where? All I could find in the server were http/s access error logs all down to malicious bots

@citeweb Nice to know I’m not alone

Installed the standard way-via dashboard direct from www.remarpro.com. Nothing special or tricky. This is a mature site so I haven’t needed to install any plugins lately, but I’ll go experiment with one of your competitors. I’ll see about the error log file too, if I can find the password without too much trouble.

When I updated 4.5.10 to the .1 update, I got the same or very similar error message, but I could tell that the plugin was still active. I did some updates to other plugins next, which ended with a 504 error (I think it was 504, something in the 5xx’s). Refreshed the Plugins page and TEC and the others were all there, and all updated.

I blew it off as a glitch on the site, not a TEC problem, but this makes it look more like TEC.

Updated to 4.5.10.1 and did a small import to test – worked as expected, no duplicates, ended in a tidy way. There were some other issues from the user side that went away as well.

I’ve used it for years on two sites, and it still seems to be the best option for this function. However, some parts are NOT intuitive, and the current version seems to need an exterminator to kill bigs.

Ok, I was wrong about this…did some other things that it’s not supposed to do and that were detrimental. Specifically, it was interfering with other plugins functions on pages…pages, not posts. (WP 4.7, in case that matters)

I know, I know – plugin behavior is poorly enforced in in WordPress, nonetheless, I’ve got no need for that. Unfortunately I don’t know how ot undo my earlier review.

Easy to set up and use, nice range of options, trouble free operation.

I think “resolved” is appropriate. There have not been any ‘incidents’ in the 60 hours since the physical server move, so I’m pretty confident that was the real problem. I’ll probably reinstall Wordfence in the next day or so – putting things back one at a time so see what happens.

Thanks for being supportive!

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that deleting Wordfence and the user.ini file had no affect on the problem I was having, but I had to play this out with the hosting company. In the end, after 3 days of the classic “it’s your software” – “no, it’s your hardware” back and forth with the hosting company, they admitted yesterday that they had a failed physical server, and moving my site to another server cured all.

They still want to allege that Wordfence is a bad actor, but I’m not ready at all to buy in to that. I have not yet reinstalled Wordfence but I plan to, and I will let you know if there are future problems.

Thanks for writing back.