I’m writing this a couple of days removed, but hopefully I can help you out so you don’t go through what I went through. Of course, not everyone will be able to do this, but at least the information might be helpful.
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On Sunday I heard from our friend Brian Hawkins on Twitter. He was telling me that he was having problems posting a comment to this blog. He thought something was missing, so I went to take a look and said everything looked fine. I even checked on 3 different browsers. So he tried it on a couple of browsers and it just wasn’t coming up properly for him. He said he’d try it at his brother’s the next day.
Monday morning I looked at comments and wondered why I wasn’t seeing any new ones. Remembering Brian’s comment the day before, and seeing that he’d sent me the comment he had wanted to post, I decided to go to one of those other browsers to post it myself. It took me to a 404 page. That was freaky, so I came into this admin panel to try to post a quick comment of my own; that wasn’t happening either, as it just kept disappearing.
Now it was panic and research time. From 8:30 in the morning until around 8:30 in the evening, with a few breaks to eat, I tried as many things as I could. Nothing was working. I even called my hosting company to see what they had to offer. They gave me some erroneous information that it had to be that my databases had gone beyond capacity. I went in and cleared one, which was really huge, and that didn’t get it done; I’m going to come back to that one in a minute.
During this time a couple other people had tried to help me, but without success. I finally went to the WordPress.org forum, because my host said it had to be their issue, and I posted the question, telling everything that I’d tried. Someone came on and started making suggestions. Some I’d already tried, but others were somewhat interesting.
They involved going into the control panel of my account on my host and getting into the PHPmyAdmin area, something I forget about because it’s not a place I have to go often; matter of fact, it’s probably been a couple of years. It was also where the hosting company had said to go and delete some files, so I was a bit skeptical.
His recommendation was to run a repair on the files I was having problems with. There were two files dedicated to comments, so I checked the box next to both of them then ran repair. It went pretty fast and gave me a positive report. I came back to the blog, posted a test comment, and all was right with the world once again; whoo hoo! 🙂
I’m writing this post because the information wasn’t anywhere else until I asked the question. Even though someone else who might end up with this issue might find that post in the forum, I figured why not write it up here as well; might save a lot of time later on. And I take this time to thank both Brian and Dan Lovell and someone called Esmi on the forum for helping me on this.
Now, back to the file I emptied. That file was related to the Count Per Day plugin I added last September. It seems that it collects tons of information and never gets rid of any of it. It had collected information to the post where the file had grown to 88MB; that’s huge. When compared to the next largest text file being only 5MB, you can tell it was out of kilter.
Many hosts don’t allow the data within an account to get larger than 100MB, and mine was around 147MB. So, clearing that file out freed up tons of space for me. Just something else to consider if you start having some issues with databases.
Thank you Mitch. This is useful information to have in case I get a similar problem.
Rummuser, you know I try to take care of people once I learn something. I just hope you never have to deal with it.
I saw it that there were problems with just one post. Something similar had happen to me in earlier versions of WordPress, there the problem was related again to plugin which was keeping the post something between the stage published draft.
@Mitch,
I had tried to comment on the post on your Grandma’s demise three times last night and gave up 🙂 Glad that you nailed the comment bug.
Best…
Ajith
Thanks Ajith. I certainly worked on it long enough. lol
Mitch, good that you shared the solution because if you’re running a blog on a 100mb free host, having an 88mb file is a real problem))) the only thing i didn’t get: this file contains all the comments to your posts? or why is it so large?
Joe, that’s not the file I emptied. The large file was attached to a plugin I was using, Count Per Day. The hosting company thought my problems were because I was over capacity, and that was the super huge file so I emptied it, but of course that turned out not to be the problem. Still, it was smart to do in the long run.
That was quite a journey you have there Mitch 😀 Wow you were there tweaking and researching for 12hrs? Well, good thing everything is back to normal again 🙂
Yes Reika, and I was going nuts. Tried a lot of things, but mainly tried to research the issue, without much success. I’m glad I decided to go the forum route; I think that’s only the 2nd time ever that I’ve tried that.
Mitch, I can always count on you to keep me in the know. Now to find a place to store this valuable information so that I can retrieve it when necessary. Guess I will have to create one.
It is unfortunate that your hosting company did not have an automated warning message that you were nearing the 100MB capacity.
Rachel, truthfully when I’d bee inside my control panel I’d seen it, but I’d never had anything negative happen so I didn’t think about it all that much. However, now that you mention it, in the past when it happened I did get a notification, so I wonder what went south this time. Luckily, it had nothing to do with my issues anyway.
Hi, Mitch!
I bet it was annoying and frustrating to go through all of it, searching for possible solutions. I am glad you managed to deal with the issue and find a solution for it.
Hope I do not have to go through the same problem, but even if I do, thanks to you I will now easily overcome any obstacle with comments disappearance.
Thanks Kristina. It was annoying because it pretty much killed my one free workday. I’m just glad I had help in figuring it out.
forums are really helpful.. But I guess I don’t want to be on the same situation like you did, scary really. But good you really take time to do some ways to be able to figure it out.
Thanks Nicole. I’m not overly big on forums, but anywhere you can get information from is always a good place.
Mitch,
Should be useful when problem arises. If it do happen then we wont be busy sorting many spams we received daily anymore Lol.
Goodness, I was getting lots of empty emails that were disappearing; freaky.
I guess that’s why we love the WordPress forums, right ? People there really come up with true solutions for real problems, and they do it all just to support the cause. Big up for that !
Guru; I’ve seen a lot of questions that never get answered, so I’m glad someone had idea for me this time around.
Hey Mitch, very nice tips regarding the comment and clearing up of the database. It was quite a long road for you to come to this point, well, you’ve accomplished it and it’s always a good thing about you that you shared it with us to avoid the annoying stuff which you’ve been through. 🙂 Thanks!
Thanks Minerva; I’m glad it was something relatively easy to fix.
That’s what I hate about plugins. Some of them don’t exactly clean themselves up when you uninstall them. And I also hate when somehow I’m the only one on the internet with a specific problem. For some reason nobody had my problem or bothered to write about it…
I had trouble believing no one else had ever had my problem Cristian, but I couldn’t find it & I’m pretty good at research. As I think about it, I probably did have a problem with a plugin, something I’ll be writing about later this week.
Thanks Mitch. I should scan through wordpress forum now for a couple glitches that I have with my RSS feed. Great site. You are real! Keep bringing it. I shall return.
Thanks… well, not quite sure what to call you. lol Actually I always start my searches via Google because most of the time they’ll take you right to what you need even if it’s in a forum.
Don’t you hate it when stuff like that happens Mitch?
You didn’t say in the post and so I’m wondering whether or not you got rid of the offending plugin?
You mean the one that was taking up all my resources? Yes, I’ve deactivated it. Another one as well, but you’ll have to wait until Wednesday to learn about that one. 😉
You know me Mitch, I’m as patient as they come 😉
I have found that plug-ins are the root of many problems when using WordPress. One plug-in can cause a bevy of issues, which goes to show that I have a love/hate relationship with them. Thanks for sharing.
Danyelle, I wouldn’t doubt if it was the Akismet plugin, although it could have been any of them since it was the comment folder. Over time I’ve reduced the number of plugins I use, but not tons. There’s just so many I feel we need to have and a couple I love having. 🙂
Mitch were you trouble shooting the whole 12 hrs? That’s crazy! Good thing everything is back to normal. And thanks for sharing your experience, this is really useful if someone will have the same problem.
Esmael, except for stopping to eat I was just here working on it and being frustrated. But I got it done.
“You don’t have because you don’t ask.” “Ask, and you shall Receive.”
It’s amazing how often people will go around frustrated because they can’t find the answer to a problem — and they never ask how to fix it. They just live with it. Or they ask the wrong person.
Glad you were able to find the answer to your, Mitch! And thanks for sharing your findings!
No problem Grady. I’ve never been afraid to ask questions; doesn’t mean I always get the answer I want though. lol
forums are actually useful.. However I guess I shouldn’t be on a single situation as if you did, frightening really. But good you actually make time to perform some methods to have the ability to decipher it.