Should any other file be in wp-content?

  • Resolved tulacat

    (@tulacat)


    12 years, 7 months ago

    Should there be any other files in the wp-content folder? Obviously the plugins, themes, upgrade and uploads folders should be there, but I have all these unexpected files ranging in dates for at least a year, some recent.

    I was backing up my site files and database (before upgrading to 3.2.1 :-)) when I discovered about 20 strange files in my wp-content folder (at the same level as the “silence is golden” index.php file).

    So you know the context of this, we have a form to enable users to make posts and upload pictures with links to their food blogs. These will display in our gallery at Chowstalker. We are using the plugin Photosmash which I will eventually abandon when I figure out how to do it better.

    The strange files all have the text/x-generic file type but some of them appear to be htlm files from various sites run by other people and some are pngs or links to flickr. It looks like those files, pics, etc are related to content from contributors to our site and don’t appear malicious, but are just artifacts of something broken. So I don’t think I’m being hacked (I hope) and it is probably just a bug in the upload process. The file folder permission for wp-content is 755 and the strange files are 644. I have not done anything funky with chmod, and we are on a bluehost shared server.

    Do you think I can safely delete those files? Do you have any ideas on how I can prevent them if they don’t belong?

    Thanks, Ron

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter tulacat

    (@tulacat)

    12 years, 7 months ago

    Hey all,

    I really would like an answer to this. My original title/question should have been, “Should there be any other files in the wp-content folder?” I realize that the magic sunrise.php from the Multisite domain mapping plugin is required, but certainly no actual content or caching files right?

    For now since this bugs me so much, I’m going to go ahead and delete them and see if new ones come back and try to figure out who/what is generating them. As I hinted before, they look like a set of html files and images from someone else’s website that somehow accidentally got saved to that folder. They don’t look too malicious since none of them contain php or javascript code. Also “the system” must have converted them to that text/x-generic file type.

    Any experience or advice from others is very welcome. Thanks.

    eric3d

    (@eric3d)

    12 years, 7 months ago

    Some plug-ins (aka NextGEN gallery) will add files or folder to wp-content.

    If you have many contributors to your site, it’s possible someone accidentally copied a file to the wrong folder. I’d isolate the files in a subfolder, test that the site still functions properly, then delete the subfolder and check in on wp-content now and then. I’m almost sure it’s human error, but I wouldn’t rule out a software error or poorly built plug-in.

    Thread Starter tulacat

    (@tulacat)

    12 years, 6 months ago

    OK, I get it.. normally there is nothing other than that index.php file or a folder from a (hopefully) well-behaved plugin. I was able to delete all those text/x-generic with no harm.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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