A Bug Or A Hack?

Finally, this blog is exhibiting normal behavior, well, almost.

No more error in connection, no more limit in simultaneous access, pages are loaded faster , and I am already upgraded to WordPress 2.3.2 . Thanks to Yuga a.k.a. Abe for the assistance and help, his Ploghost co-sponsors this site with Enthropia Philippines. Other sites hosted in the server also experienced downtime when this blog caused the spike and brought the server tumbling down. Though, we have not figured the cause of the whole thing, it has a resemblance of a bug and/or a hack. It was unfortunate that this has happened when Sonnie’s Porch is in the middle of surge of readership.

Below is part of our email exchanges:

Some plugins even modify default table structures, something which could corrupt your WP in future upgrades.

One of the things I noticed is that one default table — wp_options — has a very unusual file size of 27MB. The options tables only have 11 records normally and they should be any larger than a few kilobytes. The 27 is very suspicious.

So, when I check the table data, I was surprised to find over 47,000 rows of data. That should explain the size. But what is weirder is that what those 47,000 lines of data were about, knowing that it should be just 11 rows only.

I could not make sense of this. It is possible this was created by a plugin. I am familiar one some of the strings there — magpierss is some opens source script that scrapes all the rss feeds of sites and dumps them into one site or xml feed. It’s like an automatic aggregator. However, I cannot explain how this happened or why.

So much of this for now, meantime, allow me to enjoy blogging. Again, thanks Abe, and I’m looking forward to the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards

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