BIG problem with aLinks plugin: Blank admin area

  • SpencerLavery

    (@spencerlavery)


    18 years, 2 months ago

    Hi all,

    Noticed a problem this morning that was actually quite catastrophic. I manage over 40 blogs now and upon going to any of their Admin Areas I was presented with a blank page. Turned PHP errors on, still blank.

    One or two of the blogs were still working, and after lots of digging we realised that the ones that were down were the ones using the aLinks plugin.

    As I couldn’t log in to the Admin Area to disable the plugin, simply deleting it from the server worked. Upon re-uploading it I attempted to reactivate it – but the page just hangs and does nothing.

    I noticed that their site is down today.

    As their site’s down, and it caused mine to be; this has led me to suspect that for some reason the plugin phones home and reports some information back to their server. Quite how much it reports back I wouldn’t like to speculate, and I certainly haven’t ticked any boxes allowing it. This is worrying.

    If anyone else is experiencing similar problems, try removing the plugin and let me know your experiences.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • askageek

    (@askageek)

    18 years, 2 months ago

    I actually started a thread almost an hour ago about the aLink plugin but my problem was a bit different.

    Now that you say your site wont load I went back to the other sites where aLink is working and I notice that the sites still work but they are very slow so I am going to look at the code and see what I can find.

    Thread Starter SpencerLavery

    (@spencerlavery)

    18 years, 2 months ago

    My server timeout could be set lower than yours, hence mine not coming in but yours appearing slowly.

    Just to clarify I’m talking about the backend only – the frontends were coming in, albeit very slowly.

    triple_m

    (@triple_m)

    18 years, 2 months ago

    The aLinksNotices class looks like it connects to headzoo.com to check version information – only called when is_admin() is true as well, so I’m guessing this is the problem.

    Thread Starter SpencerLavery

    (@spencerlavery)

    18 years, 2 months ago

    OK, well that’s a lot less sinister than it could have been.

    Regardless, it’s a foolish decision to force WP to require a connection to an external web site/server in order to function just for the use of a plugin. The whole point of hosting the blog yourself is that you are responsible for its uptime/upkeep.

    He should have at the very least coded a timeout on that query that skipped over it if the server was down. I had over 30 client blogs not working for over 24 hours because of it. I hate to imagine how many others in the blogosphere were affected.

    Just a case of bad planning/architecture then. Won’t be using any headzoo plugins anymore, unfortunately. aLinks seemed to spend more time not working than working anyway, about time I had an excuse to bin it.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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