They say that when it rains, it pours! Especially if you forget to check for the rain for a long time. Who forgets to check for rain, you ask? Good question, and bad analogy. Anyhow, what I actually meant to say is that I checked the state of my website (blog, yeah) after a long time and found everything in complete tatters. And I’ve been trying to fix it for the past four to five hours.
So what went wrong? Well, for starters, Kaspersky began showing a weird Trojan Malware warning whenever I tried to open the website. No explanation given. It said ‘generic’ in the title, so I assume it was something that wasn’t specific. How useful for someone with a broken website! Anyhow, as it turns out, my Android phone had no such confusion (mainly because it doesn’t have an antivirus to begin with). Instead, it simply gave me a white screen of confusion. Great – two different devices, two different results.
So I went to the cPanel, and found that I had forgotten the password. Resetting the password from the order page of the service provider allowed me inside, but that was only this trouble was only a trailer for things to come! Logging into cPanel told me that everything was out-of-date. So I began by updating the unrelated Moodle installation on a sub-domain of this one. As it turns out, my version was several years old, and so were its dependencies. I managed to upgrade it by a couple of versions before getting stuck at trying to update the mySQL version. Since the sites themselves were opening fine and I wasn’t going to do a whole lot of educational content creation anytime soon, I decided to leave it be.
The bigger problem was that my WordPress site remained as it was, despite all the updating and going around in circles that I had done for the Moodle installation. Contacted support, and they told me that it was likely either a malware infestation or something related to a DNS conflict. The DNS conflict was apparently due to there being outdated DNS records in my nameserver list. This was promptly fixed. The support guy insisted that I consult a dev before taking a hacksaw to the supposedly malicious files, however. These were parked safely in a folder called “.quarantine” within the larger WordPress installation folder. I took a hacksaw and went my merry way anyway. Folder empty, nothing changed.
By this time, I decided that I should start digging further into the Softaculous WordPress controls in cPanel itself. Turns out, there is an option called “Debugging Mode.” Awfully ugly if you’re trying to view the website, but awfully useful if you’re trying to fix it. Without further ado, I turned it on. The Kaspersky error remained the same, but on my Android, the blank white page now had a lot of writing on it.
Cue another session with the tech support. Except it never materialized because Chrome decided that ‘something went wrong.’ Left to my own devices, I decided that where human minds failed (or were unavailable due to Google’s capriciousness), AI would have to do. ChatGPT promptly told me that the error messages originated from two plugins. And yes, before you ask, those had not been updated in an eternity and a half, either.
Turned off two of these plugins but the errors continued to come in. Eventually, I managed to get the errors down to just one – something something about the theme of the website “2015” (because it was 2015 when I had set up the blog and hadn’t bothered to update the theme since). Since I was going about everything with a hacksaw anyway, I decided to trash the theme entirely. Instead, I chose the “2025” theme (because…. yeah you get it) and rolled with it.
The website preview looked butt-ugly, and the text was barely readable. Worse, I had to make all the changes on my phone since Kaspersky still wouldn’t accept that the site was simply doing what sites do – display information. I was quite sure by this time that the Trojan error was a true Trojan horse – it was an error that wasn’t, and it was denying me access that I should have. I could (and still can) call it out as a false positive, but I first needed to get my site in working order.
Once I had gone through the preview and ensured that at least the text was readable, I decided to activate the theme and hope for the best. As it turns out, it does work. Voila! Problem solved!
Partially yes, since the website now opens on my Android phone. I could probably get Kaspersky to give me a break by reporting a false positive. But the graphics and text still look absolutely horrendous. I had had only one theme picture, and the rest of the media uploaded on the blog are highly contextual game screenshots. I had to make one of them (from AC Origins) the background and it makes everything look like it was designed in the early 2000s. *sigh*
Anyhow, given how much effort was required to fix the website – or at least, partially fix it – I do solemnly resolve, again, to write more frequently than I have in the past year. And hope that the site stays up so you guys can actually read what I write!
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