WordPress Failure

[Jennifer]

Hi,

I just ran the update yesterday and now I have people trying to submit to the community calendar saying they are getting an error that there is a “WordPress Failure.” I read through previous threads and I know theme capability was mentioned but my community events were working fine until today. Just wondering if this is a known issue (I didn’t see it listed) or if you anyone has any trouble shooting advice.

[George]

Hey Jennifer,

So sorry to hear this! Can you share a screenshot of the specific error messages you get, or copy and paste them in full? Or is it just literally the text “WordPress Failure”, with no other error text?

Thank you!
George

[Jennifer]

Hi George,

Sorry for the delay. The person trying to create the event did not take a screen shot unfortunately so I need to try and recreate the problem. It’s on my to do list for tomorrow. Stay tuned!

[George]

Thanks Jennifer! Keep us posted! 😀

[Jennifer]

Ok so I was not able to re-create the issue but I had another user email today complaining about the same issue so I was able to have her give me more detail. She goes through the whole process of inputting all her information. When she hits submit, she gets a screen that says “Are you sure you want to do that?” In the tab of the browser it says “WordPress Failure”. On that screen there is no button to allow you to proceed or anything. She said she tried it from multiple browsers. She tried on IE, Chrome and from her phone. The pictures below are from her trying on FireFox. Sorry they aren’t the best quality, she was taking photos of her screen instead of taking a screen shot.

I know the community calendar is working cause I’ve received other submissions, it seems it’s just a problem for some users. Please advise!

[George]

Thanks a ton for this information, Jennifer, and for your patience and persistence with this issue. I’d also like to thank the user of yours who tested this and shared these images! 😀

Their images are helpful, because they reveal the specific type of error folks are encountering. The “Are you sure you want to do this?” error message seen in the photos is something WordPress usually displays when a nonce fails to verify—in a nutshell, nonces are a security feature of WordPress that help prevent the abuse of things like URLs and forms. (Read more here). The community events submission form implements a number of nonces to help ensure that it’s secure.

Just to be clear, while nonces are related to security, I don’t want to give you the impression that there’s a security risk on your site, or that it’s being hacked or something—totally not the case! Nonces can fail to verify for a number of reasons. The key to this issue now is figuring out why they’re failing to verify—it could be because of caching, for example.

Sorry to go on about nonces—I just wanted to give some backstory about what these error messages mean, because it’s relevant and should help dictate how we move forward in investigating and fixing these issues.

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Three Questions

Based on what you’ve shared thus far, I have three main questions about your site. The answers to these questions may be very helpful. Those questions are as follows—please answer each one in your response to the best of your abilities:

1. In your site’s “System Information”, there’s a MU plugin listed whose name is “System Plugin”. Do you know anything about this plugin? Where is it from? Did you install it yourself? Who made it? Any info you can provide along these lines will be very helpful.

2. How, specifically, are you hosting your website? Are you self-hosting it on a server you personally maintain? Or are you hosting with a web host like GoDaddy, BlueHost, HostGator, etc.? Let us know what specific web host you’re using, and share a link to their site directly. This may be very relevant to the issue you’re experiencing.

3. Do you have any custom theme templates related to Community Events or The Events Calendar at all? Have you modified any code related to The Events Calendar, Community Events, your child theme, or hired anyone else to modify the code of any of these things?

Thanks Jennifer! 😀

George

[Jennifer]

Hi George,

I appreciate all the info. To answer your questions:

1. I can’t find the plugin your referencing and to my knowledge, no, we did not install that plugin so I don’t have the who, what, why info on it. If you think this may be part of the problem, I can work with my developer to look in to it.

2. I’m using GoDaddy and I’m on a managed wordpress account.

3. Yes, I believe my developer modified the code in some way on the page the calendar appears to allow a sidebar to show up. That said, I just remembered that when you asked and noticed that the sidebar is no longer there. To my knowledge she did not alter code to the calendar itself in any way but I will double check!.

What’s next?

[George]

Thanks so much for this information, Jennifer—and for your patience and persistence here.

Two important facts here are as follows: First, I am not able to recreate your problems no matter what I try on my own testing site. Next, we have no other reports of this issue from other customers.

In other words, it seems like there’s something unique to your site that is problematic here. With this in mind, I would recommend the following two steps:

1. Contact GoDaddy’s Hosting Support

You mention hosting your site with GoDaddy, and so I would recommend contacting their customer support to see if they can identify anything on their end that might explain these issues. They may also be able to shed some light on that “System Plugin” I mentioned and which you said you weren’t familiar with.

2. Test for Conflicts

If you can reliably recreate the issues you face with the submission form—or, if you can’t, at least have someone else on hand who can reliably reproduce those issues—I would encourage you or them do the complete set of troubleshooting steps on this page → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/testing-for-conflicts/ After EACH STEP in that process, check back on your issues and try to recreate them—see if anything improves along the way.

☝️ The most important part of these troubleshooting steps here is the theme test—see if you can reliably encounter the same issues when a default theme like Twenty Twelve or Twenty Seventeen is activated on your site.

Thanks so much for your patience here, Jennifer! I’m sorry for the trouble but am determined to keep working on this to figure out what’s happening.

Sincerely,
George

[Jennifer]

Hi George,

I spoke to GoDaddy and I don’t think it is anything on their end. That system plugin you referenced is something that comes standard with their managed hosting accounts and contains some files, some stock images, etc., none of which are currently activated on my site.

Before I go through all the trouble shooting just a quick question about the theme. If the plugin is working for some users and not others, is it even possible for it to be a problem with the theme? If it were truly a problem with the theme wouldn’t all users would have the same problem? I literally got 20+ event submissions today alone without issue. Is it possible that this is a caching issue at the user level?

[George]

Hey Jennifer,

You’re absolutely right that this could be a caching or other lower-level issue and not a theme issue.

A few things to note here as follows:

1. To be clear, the Troubleshooting Steps I linked to include much more than just the theme testing.

2. Next, while it’s generally true that a theme issue would probably not manifest in the way in which these issues are manifesting, I’m not able to recreate your problems and we don’t have other reports of them—so it seems like the unique and specific combination of variables that make up your site is where the cause of the problem will be found.

That “unique and specific combination of variables” on your site is, really, just the combination of plugins, theme, and hosting. You’ve described how hosting is not likely the relevant variable here, and I generally agree with that view. So next on the list to check is the plugins and themes.

Plugins and themes can cause caching issues because they may be specifying their own cookies or doing other operations that affect issues like the nonce failures we see happening here.

I hope this backstory helps—I know that testing plugins and themes in this way can be a bit tedious, and genuinely appreciate your patience here!

Sorry for the continued trouble. Please let me know if you’re able to do those complete troubleshooting steps and, if so, what you find by doing so.

Thank you!
George

[Jennifer]

Hi George,

Ok I’m at the point where I need to go through the testing but how am I supposed to determine what is causing the problem when I can’t recreate the issue myself? Myself and another person from a different location have both been able to submit events without issue so I’m not sure how to test if I can’t recreate the issue.

Also, is there anyone on your team I could contract with to do this testing? I don’t have time and I’m not sure the developer I usually work with does either.

Please advise.

[Jennifer]

***UPDATE*** I’ve had 3 users just this morning report the same error and I am still unable to recreate it.

[George]

Hi Jennifer,

Thanks for reaching out.

how am I supposed to determine what is causing the problem when I can’t recreate the issue myself

↑ This is a valid concern for sure. Here is what I wrote about it:

If you can reliably recreate the issues you face with the submission form—or, if you can’t, at least have someone else on hand who can reliably reproduce those issues—I would encourage you or them do the complete set of troubleshooting steps

I bolded some text above for emphasis.

But yes, it’s unfortunately a truth that if you cannot recreate issues yourself, you would need to find someone who can and have them do the steps I recommended above.

is there anyone on your team I could contract with to do this testing?

Unfortunately, no, we are not able to provide this sort of service. 🙁

I am genuinely sorry about this situation, Jennifer. I cannot recreate your issues, and you yourself often cannot reproduce your issues, and so there’s a bit of a stalemate on these problems.

We do have another update coming soon—hopefully this week, for example—and it’s possible that this update could incidentally fix your issues. So one option is to just sit tight and wait for that update, and then if issues persist even after that, proceed with getting one of your users who experiences these issues to do the troubleshooting.

Please let me know what you think!

Sincerely,
George

[Jennifer]

The people that are having the issue are users of my community, basically the general public. They aren’t members of my team that I could go to and say “hey help me troubleshoot this” so working with someone that is able to recreate the issue is not viable option.

So what I am hearing you say is there is really no other advice or support you can offer me at this point, is that correct?

If so, please advise as to what your refund policy is.

[George]

Hey Jennifer,

Is the difference between people who can experience the problems vs those who cannot experience the problems simply that those who can experience the problems are logged-out of the site? And so once you log into the site that the problems are no longer experienced?

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You can learn about our refund policy here → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/refund-policy/

— George

[Author]

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