Strange thing happened when activating plugins using Bulk Actions
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Something strange suddenly happened to my Installed Plugins page this evening
When I tried to activate multiple plugins using Bulk Actions, one plugin somewhere in the middle of the list seemed to be causing problem.
All plugins below this plugins, including this plugin, cannot be activated. Only those above this plugin can be activated.
If I tick this plugin off, then all other plugins, both above and below this plugin, can be activated.
If I tried to activate only this plugin, it cannot be activated, no matter how many times I tried.
So what’s wrong?
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It’s the free version of a payment gateway plugin, which does not provide support at all. Only the paid version does. I’ve encountered this similar situation with this same plugin just a couple months ago when it suddenly stopped working and only prompted me to contact the administrator. But to contact them would mean to have to upgrade to the paid version. I placed a thread on their WP support forum anyway but received no response at all.
I happened to just purchase a new laptop back then (my site was and still is hosted on my laptop) so I reinstalled WP on the new pc and re-created my site on it and the plugin worked on the new one.
Now a couple months later, this strange thing happened again from this same plugin. If my site is already up and running now this would mean I’d be forced to pay to upgrade to keep my site running. I don’t want to see everybody as bad guys but I now can’t help suspect if this is how they, the plugin authors, trick us to upgrade.
But at the same time, when I used Bulk Actions to activate multiple plugins, all plugings below this plugin did not get activated. So I also wonder if there’s something wrong somewhere, which is why I’d have posted this thread.
I already tried re-installing Wrodpress and migrated my whole site to the new install but the same problem persisted.
I waited a little bit to reply with the intention to see how the issue would evolve so that i won’t end up with a false accusation before revealing the name of the plugin.
The plugin released a new update late last night and fixed the problem. It’s Paid Membership Pro.
Having said that, the (2) from Liam’s last reply raised a very good point that I’d like to hear your opinions from you, especially Andrew if you could since your’e the moderator, or anybody.
First off, I agree that most authors / developers here are honest.
Now allow me to share 2 stories.
I started learning WP just a bit over a year ago. Back then, I didn’t know anything at all. I first bought a theme form Themeforest, a seemingly well-known reputable marketplace. I had a kind of ambitious website idea, but knew nothing in the tech department. I had to ask the theme author for everything, even a simple task of hiding something on the page, which can be easily done through a CSS plugin, which I didn’t know back then. The theme author ended up keylogging my laptop, followed me on WordPress support forum, disguised under a different identity trying to fool me to buy a bunch of useless themes. In the end he found out I actually fooled him.
A couple months later (things had been quiet prior to this point) when I was already off guard, I was almost done developing my site at that time, and suddenly my site (was still using his theme dveloping my site on my laptop hard drive back then) started to experience lots of strange problems, one after another. When I finally had to post these issues on WP support forum, I fell into his trap again when he again pretended someone to help and learned about how I normally re-install wordpress and my site files and database to fix problems. The following day when I was doing just that, my entire datebase sql file saved on my device was ruined. That means I had to rebuild my entire site from the scratch again. (The whole incident with this theme author took place in a 6 -7 ~ months time so this is just a fast forward without many details.)
Just a couple months ago I was researching membership plugins. I found one in WP depository that has an important feature I need and it’s in their free version. So I downloaded it and tried it out right away. It did work but I wasn’t ready to commit back then but just researching. So I deleted it. Two days later when I went back to their plugin detail page, that particular, and only that particular feature, suddenly disappeared form the free version and was moved to the paid version. I don’t know about you but personally I was shocked. That means and seems to prove to me that these plugin authors, and probably theme authors too, can actually track us down, see what we’re doing on our site, to the single individual level. And can probably see the content on our sites, too. And that realization really alarmed me.
Well, at this point, one may come up with their own conclusion on these experiences , and some will probably say I’m just being paranoid.
I’m not going to argue or say anything about that.
I’m not a techie and I learned just enough to create what I need to create. Not being developers or people working for / behind WordPress ourselves, it may behoove us to know just what authors / developers of plugins and themes, whether in WP depository or not, have access to our site content, to our data, to the files on our hard drive including those unrelated to our site (localhosted) or our files saved in the servers of our host.
Thank you for reading such a long message. I really appreciate that.
The theme author ended up keylogging my laptop, followed me on WordPress support forum, disguised under a different identity trying to fool me to buy a bunch of useless themes. In the end he found out I actually fooled him.
What is the username of that user?
As an outsider, I think this is looking more as coincidence than someone tracking you. There is no programmatic way of tracking users through ww.wp.xz.cn. ww.wp.xz.cn is controlled by some clever and good people, some of which work for Automattic. The only tools ww.wp.xz.cn provides to plugin authors is the ability to resolve threads.
If someone can look into the issue with the plugin itself, I would recommend installing the previous version. If you could narrow down the bit of code that causes the issue that would be great too. However, I imagine replicating this problem will be time consuming.
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