Issues with AJAX and VMWare

Put on your helmets and boots, because we’re gonna get messy here.

Rewind back to last year or so. I ran my community’s website (rebirthgaming.org) using WordPress, hosted on OVH. We used a theme called Sevenmag, which utilized Visual Composer. We also used a forum plugin called Simple:Press. Everything worked all fine and dandy. At this time, though, we were using Nginx rather than Apache.

Then, someone within our community failed to pay our OVH bill, and we ‘lost’ our website, databases, etc. Turns out that someone actually managed to get a backup of everything.

Fast forward to today, we are on a different host (don’t recall who). This time, we are using Apache rather than Nginx. Our website, databases etc have been preserved and put on this new host, as if nothing changed.

For a while, our website didn’t have a lot of activity. Then, I began a project which drew in traffic to our forums. Since then, I’ve been getting reports that our forums have issues.

So, this week, I started to investigate.

The issue is that when a user is logged IN, and they let the forum page sit idle until Simple:Press’s auto-refresh kicks in, the site throws script errors and the forums break.

I investigate this further by disabling plugins until the problem goes away. When I disable Visual Composer, the issue goes away, however, another issue surfaces (likely due to the fact my theme, Sevenmag, relies on VC). As a result, I can’t have both VC and my theme active.

Next, I disable my theme, install a new one, and uninstall VC. I go back to my forums, wait until the auto-refresh kicks in… and this time, complete white screen.

During this whole time, I’m kicking info back and forth between the Simple:Press support guys, as they try to give me insight into how to fix it.

As of right now, the Simple:Press support are stumped. We’ve pretty much determined that the problem is NOT my theme, is NOT my plugins (in fact, the problem happens with ALL plugins except Simple:Press disabled), and is NOT Simple:Press itself.

What we’ve pretty much determined is that something is hijacking Ajax calls.
http://prntscr.com/c1n34i

In fact, someone else who was helping me resolve this problem earlier on found out this:

http://prntscr.com/c1n2th

The Simple:Press support guy told me to just disable the Simple:Press auto-refresh feature for now, which does INDEED fix the problem. However, this means that 1) Auto-refresh features will be disabled and 2) There might be a much more serious problem behind the scenes, and I would prefer to fix it rather than resort to band-aid solutions.

I should note that I have complete access to my web server, all the way down to root level. So, if this issue is based on server configuration or something, then I can troubleshoot from there as well. Thing is, I don’t trust myself messing with core files and by no means a server expert.