Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
My Bluehost. I think I’ll keep her.
(Okay, does anyone recognize the reference in the title? If you’re under, say, 42 years old, don’t even try.)
The tech at Bluehost figured out my Issues. First, to recap, I couldn’t log in to my admin panel. Whenever I would try, I would get to login.php (like usual), I would put in my username and password, click “login,” and then I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked out.
Then I would type in my password again, click “login,” and I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked out. Then I would type in my password again, click “login,” and I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked out. Then I would type in my password again, click “login,” and I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked out. Then I would type in my password again, click “login,” and I would see that same login.php screen with the password blanked —
Eventually, I figured out that sheer stick-toitiveness was not enough. I had one other option open to my puny brain: change the password! I clicked on the link on the login.php screen and it told me that instructions would be sent to my email address. The email had a link to a page telling me “click on this link.” When I clicked on the link, I was given a screen telling me that instructions would be sent to my email address. The email had a link to a page —
Oh, now this was bulllshit. So I called the Bluehost tech support line, fully expecting them to tell me it was a WordPress issue so go to hell. But no! The guy figured it out. More on that in a minute.
Now, I know I’ve slammed Bluehost in the past for suspending me without warning just because of a few measly spams. I’ve even threatened moving on to some other host just to spite the Blue Group. Pat J.’s probably still hankering for me to shift to DreamHost (or whatever it’s called) so he’ll get some beaucoup Dreampoints. Sorry, Pat.
It was delightful watching this guy in action. He kept trying trick after trick. Was it a cache problem? No. A Firefox problem? No. We kept trying one thing after another. Had I been blacklisted by my own blog? No.
Finally, he figured it out: somehow, my blog had become convinced that I had an open admin panel out there Somewhere. If you’re logged in, you can’t log in! Such a nefarious tautology. So he logged me out, and now I can log in. And in the future, I MUST log out so that this will not happen again.
Because, needless to say, even though the tech guy figured out my problem, God only knows how I could fix it for myself. Databases. It had something to do with databases.
D.
It gets weirder. I can log in from Internet Explorer, but when I try to log in from Firefox, the same damn thing happens.
It’s a Microsoft plot.
And weirder still. It got to where the same problem was happening. I called back, and the next tech guy figured out that one of the Spam Karma 2 files was corrupted. We got rid of SK2 and now everything seems fine. I think. (Where’s my blue frog gravatar, though?)
I have Akismet, so hopefully I’m still covered spam-wise.
Your gravatar’s there – it’s just loading sloooooowly.
Hey, I’m actually the tech that was helping your “phone tech”. The problem was actually a bad plugin you had. Either the plugin was not compatible with the version of WordPress you are running, or something is missing or modified within the files. The way I fixed this was to first, rename the ‘plugins’ folder located at wp-content/plugins, to something else. I chose ‘plugins-bak’. This instantly fixed the problem. Now that I knew it was a plugin, I renamed the ‘plugins-bak’ folder back to ‘plugins’ and then removed each folder within the ‘plugins’ folder until it began to work. Turns out the folder ‘SK2’ was the culprit. Looks like a plugin called ‘Spam Karma 2’.
Glad to hear you’re sticking with us. I love it here at Bluehost.
Thanks for your help. Even though I’m still a little tweaked over getting suspended without so much as an email, you tech support guys have been superb every step of the way.
I’m not in it for the DreamPoints (unless they taste like chocolate chip cookies). I’m in it for the happiness of the world.
Oh, and the filthy, filthy luchre.
How goes the time travel? I see you’ve traveled back to this old post 🙂