tobymole

Thanks for the info folks. I’ll take a look into the firewall services mentioned.

Do you know is cloudflare much good at mitigating these types of attacks?
I tried using cloudflare before on another site (for other reasons) but never got it working, so left it sitting in the dust and dont really want to spend time fiddling around with it again if it is just to find out it doesnt really help.

Thanks

Ah, it appears this last extra image was down to the theme size code.

Finding and commenting the line
set_post_thumbnail_size( 624, 9999 ); // Unlimited height, soft crop
in the functions.php file solved the issue.

If anyone else is following this: A) remember to un-comment the same line and add the sizes back into the Settings > Media options when you have finished repairing the media library so that thumbnails start being created for newly uploaded images as contributors add them, and B) the page at the following link helped me to solve this: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-prevent-wordpress-from-generating-image-sizes/

OK, so I found I can reduce the number of thumbnails created by setting the image sizes in WP > Settings > Media to 0, but adding still creates one extra additional image ??

E.G. Adding myimage-1024×682.jpg creates another image named myimage-1024×628-624×416.jpg

I note that only the original image shows in the media library after this process…

I used the database search and replace PHP script from interconnect.it to search all the tables and replace with the new url. Yay

never mind it was something to do with SQL DB user permissions.

I dont know exactly what the issue was here, but I was using non-standard http ports on my apache install to prevent conflicts with other programmes. changing the ports back to standard (after moving the other programmes to use other ports) and everything seems to be working as intended. -\_(“,)_/-

PPS: I have tried running the SQL update of the siteurl and home variables mentioned in the link from my OP, with no appreciable difference :\

PS: my wait_timeout variable appears to be relevent according to other posts I am reading. In my case running the SQL:
SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE "%wait%"
shows it is set to the default 288000 or 8 hours.
Im not sure if any of the other wait variables (innodb_lock_wait, lock_wait_timeout, etc) are relevant?

ok think i sorted it just reinstalled. hope it continues to work ??