Gobbledygook (code) showing on Events page for some users

[dmuuc]

As I’m writing this I have the Pro plugin disabled with the free version only on and the problem didn’t seem to be happening.

It was reported to me today by 2 users that the web site was showing “gobbledygook” or “gibberish” – it was a bunch of code. When they told me, I thought the site had been hacked, but then I looked at the site and it looked fine. I couldn’t recreate the problem in my Firefox on a Mac OS browser. It may have been due to cache or that I was logged in. So I tried Safari and the home page looked fine, so I clicked Events which looked fine when I first went to it, but when I went to another page, it turned to showing a page of code. Once the error occurred, it was seen on all pages, even non-calendar pages. After disabling Pro, the site seemed fine. I tried it with a Windows computer, too, but when I sent to the small ministries page that one was still like that. I haven’t tested them all, but it seems like the Pro plugin might have something to do with it since the Events calendar seems to work fine without the Pro plugin activated.

With the Pro plugin off, the widgets look fine on Firefox in Windows and Safari on Mac, but on Firefox on Mac, my Upcoming Events and Upcoming Classes cannot be seen in the right sidebar.

My server error logs aren’t working, but I will continue to try to fix this problem, though if you could check it to see if it’s still a problem and if the Pro plugin could have something to do with it, I’d appreciate it. One page where the error is still occurring is here:
http://dmuuc.org/connecting/small-group-ministries/

I’ll post back if I figure it out. Thanks!

[Brook]

Howdy dmuuc,

Thank you for posting. I am glad to help as best I can.

I am unable to recreate the issue on the linked page, or any others. After you had disabled PRO, if you disable your caching plugin (assuming you have one), did the errors immediately go away. If so that might explain why I can not see the errors.

I can not help diagnose this very well withou seeing the errors. Would it be possible for you to take screenshots of them? When they do appear, could you run through some basic diagnostic steps for me that will help us figure out if this is a “conflict” error? The following steps help isolate those:

Could you try temporarily activating the default Twenty Thirteen theme, and seeing if the issue persists.

If disabling the theme fixes it, we have narrowed the issue down to a theme conflict. Do you have any theme overrides for the Events Calendar? If so could you try disabling them by renaming your [themename]/tribe-events/ folder to ‘tribe-events-bak’. Did that fix it?

If the issue persists in the default Twenty Thirteen theme, then we have a different set of debugging steps. Please keep the Twenty Thirteen theme enabled, and also disable any plugins other than the ones from Modern Tribe to see if that fixes it. If it does, please try reenabling the plugins one at a time until the issue resurfaces. When it does resurface, can you let me know which plugin caused that to happen?

Please let me know as much as you can. The more information the better! Let me know if you have any questions. Cheers!

– Brook

[dmuuc]

Thanks! It turned out that Wordfence was causing the problem that created an infinite error loop according to the error files.

[Brook]

Howdy dmuuc,

I am glad you were able to isolate this! Thanks for confirming.

A little background information: A lot of WP security plugins restirct access to /wp-admin/. The trouble is that WordPress’ Ajax API routes all requests through /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php. So when a plugin cuts off access to this, it effectively kills one of WordPress’ APIs that a log of plugins like ours use. Because of this, many of those security plugins have options relating to restricting access to /wp-admin/. Frequently unchecking those boxes makes them play nice with other plugins.

I am going to close this topic out now that it is resolved. Thanks for posting! If you have a minute or two, we would love it if you could write a few words about the plugin here. Happy developing!

– Brook

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