philbusey

Thanks wookieejeremy for the recommendations to not autoupdate and not uninstall necessary plugins.

I am weighing carefully your first recommendation because websites are a part-time hobby and I have little knowledge and only so much time in the day.

On your second recommendation, not to uninstall necessary plugins, I found out the hard way. After I uninstalled LiteSpeed Cache, on one out of three websites the page header disappeared and menu items were disarrayed across the page. The dashboard warned, Can NOT find LSCWP path for object cache initialization in /home/xxxxxxx/domains/xxx_domainname_xxx/public_html/wp-content/object-cache.php’

The explanation went back to my mistaken uninstallation, “This error happens when you have deleted LightSpeed Cache before removing object-cache.php and advanced-cache.php files. These files created when you have installed LightSpeed Cache (LSCWP) plugin.” The webpage https://pcboy.medium.com/wordpress-fix-can-not-find-lscwp-path-for-object-cache-initialization-98857e298b2c instructed how to properly delete the orphaned Litespeed files, but I just reinstalled Litespeed and all appears well.

This is fundamentally not an Anti-spam Cleantalk problem, but a Litespeed problem, so this sounds off-topic. But it started with a Cleantalk problem. And it illustrates overriding wordpress issues: plugin conflicts, backups, staging environments, and not to panic when things go badly.

Fix saved three websites that shut me out of WP Admin.

Fortunately, hosting company Hostinger has a WordPress “Overview” panel that allowed me to turn off Litespeed, which allowed me to manage Cleantalk plugin as directed.

Now I am nervous about both Anti-Spam by CleanTalk as well as Litespeed Cache so I have them both either deleted or deactivated. Also, I wonder if the problem started with an automatic plugin update.

Awesome. Thanks.

Phil