Last week I had a pretty major problem, that was ongoing (posted about here). My weblog kept rejecting a new submission and I thought it was one of the plugins (it wasn’t). I did some modifications to one of the third party plugins and in doing so, overwrote over twelve years of weblog entries. My webhost’s backups were of no help. I figured I was out of luck.
Thanks to Boyink! for his suggestion that I sign up for the free trial of support. I didn’t think I could since I bought V2 back in 2009. I just installed it back in March of this year. I’ve never needed support to this extent. I did ask about support and was told I could sign up for the trial period since I’d never used it in the past. But, as I said, I didn’t think there was much that could be done. The entries were gone.
Well, on Tuesday, the same thing happened when I tried to submit a new entry. I was redirected to my main weblog page. After some sleuthing, it became apparent that the word “xanax” was the culprit. But why?
During a search of my computer in the directory I’d downloaded last week, trying to see why xanax would do what it was doing, I came across my saved SQL database from last March from when I upgraded from version 1 to version 2. Great news, because it had all of those previous entries. So, I had two issues. The redirection and merging those old entries with new (during my “fix”, I’d set up a new channel ID for new entries, having overwritten the previous ID with lots and lots of nothing). Now I had a reason to submit a help request. Robin came to my rescue. Old data was merged with new data and my entries through March were still there. Others were found using the WayBackMachine or Google cache.
And what started this entire thing? The blocking of the word “xanax”? Robin told me it was at the server level. A little piece of software my host was running by the name of mod_security. My host support didn’t believe it could be that, but once it was disabled on my weblog’s subdomain, I could use the word xanax as often as I liked.
Oh and if you ever lose stuff and try to find it on Google cache? If you don’t find it on your first try, use one of the other URLs. Try it by the entry name, then the entry month, then the entry day. Entries that were not found using the permalink or the month, were found on the day URL.
And instead of months of reconstruction, it only took hours.
Thank you!