Well, that was scary.

Sometime yesterday, something very strange happened to this blog. At first, all was well for the visitor; the site was readable, comments were doing what comments ought to do, but I couldn’t log in to the site. The login page accepted my input, went away and thought about it… and returned an empty page. Returning to the site, I found that I was still not logged in.

So, into the Codex I went. And the forums. The possible fixes for login problems are many and various, but none of them quite fitted the situation. Tinkering with the database and the wp-login.php seemed to be making things steadily worse, and scarier still, restoring from a two-day-old backup made the whole site return empty pages. By the end of the day, the whole thing was utterly, utterly broken.

This morning, I uploaded a fresh installation of WP, restored another, more recent backup, and got back in to the site. I don’t appear to have lost anything, and as you see, I am logged in and posting — but the problem persists, in a slightly different form.

I can’t seem to log out; the login page returns empty as before, and the blog shows I’m still logged in. Also, some (but not all) admin functions are executing but returning empty pages: changing widgets, editing posts or comments, saving Draft posts. So far, I’ve been able to get back via the admin main page, but I’m dreading the prospect of restarting the machine, and finding I’m back where I was, twenty four hours ago.

I’ll be taking this to the WP forums, but I’m rather doubtful that I’ll get any useful response. The last two or three questions I’ve posted there have enjoyed no resolution, and between them attracted only one reply — from another user having what sounded like a similar difficulty, wanting to know if I’d solved it. Also, the proportion of forum posts which are not resolved appears to be growing steadily. Or maybe I’m reaching a stage where I’m only reading the Really Bad Problems…