Missing Paged Module Prevents Login

Hi Eliot,

I’m reopening this thread because I’m still having the same problem and I think it will be easier to troubleshoot if all the info is together.

So, the same issue has occurred twice since the first time. On these two occasions, I went to Site A (from the scenario described above) and couldn’t log in. I saw that same white screen displaying the error message that paged.php isn’t loading. Knowing what the issue was, I logged in to my hosting account to replace the missing file.

Now, on the first of these two occasions, I verified each of my four sites using CCS, and paged.php was missing, so I downloaded the latest version of CCS from the repository, deleted the plugin files from each of my sites, and manually installed the zip file on each site. Before doing that, I had checked to confirm that the latest plugin version was indeed installed on each of my sites. It was. So the version I manually installed ended up being the same version I was already running.

Then, on the second of these two occasions, which was only today, I simply copied paged.php over for each site, since there hasn’t been an update to the plugin since the last time I downloaded the files from the repository. I had stored the plugin files outside my public_html folder for easy access in case this happened again… Good thing, eh? Lol.

I noticed something else that’s curious in all of this. I know for a fact I didn’t access any of my websites yesterday, and yet, when I checked the plugin files from my hosting account, for all my sites it said the last modified date of the Modules folder was yesterday morning, whereas the last modified date for the rest of the plugin folders and files, including the plugin’s main folder as well as the files within the Modules folder, was the day before the last update, May 3rd (the repository indicates the plugin was last updated on May 4th). I had accessed each of my sites the day before yesterday and everything was working fine, so clearly, the issue began yesterday morning, when the Modules folder was somehow modified, resulting in the removal of paged.php. Of course, the dates all changed again when I copied over paged.php.

I find it strange, too, that the date shown, May 3rd, didn’t match the date when I had deleted and fully reinstalled the plugin. I don’t remember precisely when that was, but it had to be after the last update since the version I had downloaded is still the latest one.

This is all very perplexing to me and I have no idea what to do to troubleshoot this. I also seem to be the only one experiencing problems, and I don’t understand why since it’s happening on all my sites running CCS. Could it be related to the fact that of those four sites, one is in the main public_html folder (Site B from the previous scenario), while the other three are subfolder installs? That seems unlikely to me since it’s a common setup (plus the plugin has always worked with this setup before). I’ve also disallowed automatic plugin and theme updates, and only allow security updates from core, so how things are happening “behind my back” is beyond me!

To be honest, while it’s annoying when I can’t login without first going to modify some plugin files, that’s not the end of the world to me. What bothers me most is that whenever this happens, my custom CSS is affected on one of my sites (the one in the main public_html folder, Site B), so until I visit the site, I have no idea it’s not displaying correctly on the front end. So far I’ve been lucky in that the “ugly period” hasn’t lasted much more than 24 hours, but still…

I don’t know if you’ll be able to help me with this since I seem to be the only one with problems, but if you have any ideas at all, I would be so grateful! Thanks, Eliot!

Ouch! Sorry to hear that! But it does look like that person is getting the same error message as me. I know it’s not a good thing for you or the plugin, but I’m relieved not to be alone in this 😉

Your suggestion about caching has got me thinking — I use the Wordfence security plugin on all my sites, which also offers two caching features (I use the advanced Falcon Engine mode, not the basic mode). I noticed that a security scan completed not long after the files changed yesterday (maybe 30 minutes later, at most). The scan includes comparing installed plugins to the originals in the repository. Wordfence then creates alerts and provides options for manual actions, but as far as I know, nothing is ever done automatically. Still, the timing seems a little suspicious…

It may all just be a moot point if your suggested changes work — that would be ideal! Lol.

Have a good day, Eliot!

Well, paged.php went missing again yesterday. I didn’t notice at first because of the new include method, but when I checked my error log, I saw that there were tons of a similar message as before (but with include instead of require).

Since I didn’t log in yesterday and error messages repeat themselves twice every fifteen minutes, I can only assume bot attacks are triggering the errors (so thank goodness Wordfence is blocking those!).

More interesting is that I can confirm from reviewing the error log that the file has been going missing once a week. This helps me rule out the Wordfence scan as the culprit, since it is performed daily.

Just to be safe, I’ve excluded paged.php from the Wordfence cache. Now let’s see what happens next week! I do hope we can figure this out because the size of my error log was crazy…