3NT

First of all, thank you for the quick response.

1. the site runs on wordpress 5.3.2, theme colormag (free). We recently migrated from non responsive theme and I still sorting out old content. If I new it would be such a mess with Platinum SEO update, I would keep the older version, for some time at least.

2. “Use Title Rewriter” was on after update (as I mentioned before, plugin automatically switched off)

3. “Force Rewrite Title”
What I did was switching all the plugins off and switching it back. I had situation couple of times when this action helped. Not now. But at the moment I eventually could see old descriptions in the admin of the posts. To be honest, yesterday even excerpts wasn’t shown on the homepage. I went to sleep and in the morning excerpts on the homepage were OK. Strange?!? (I don’t have any cash plugin because our traffic is not that big and I’ve never seen the hosting cashing our website)

Now, even with all the plugins off situation is the same:
– I see description in admin
– in the code meta-name description is taken from excerpt.
– using “Force Rewrite Title” doesn’t affect a thing the only time I see the difference is when both options are off

4. “…follow the FAQs…” “switch off before update”
Well, update has already been done. Once again, there was no warning… or I would not be here asking questions. I didn’t switch plugin off before update because usually it is not required.

5. <?php wp_head(); ?>
It looks like that in this theme:
…
wp_head();
?>
</head>
Similar but not identical as in FAQs. Somehow I think, <?php a long way ahead do the trick and it’s the same code.

6. You didn’t answer part of my original question, is there any way to get back to old version?

7. I’m going to check the situation with php version. Somehow the hosting stopped updating it automatically. Then I’ll see if it do the trick.

PS. Not related but since we’re already talking… There is a problem with encoding on https://techblissonline.com/platinum-seo-pack-faq/ . Symbols like “ or ’ are popping up in the text. I had similar situation once. The site was with UTF-8 extended (not sure if it’s proper name) and it was moved to new hosting. Hosting did the moving, in the end everything was on UTF-8 which is slightly not compatible with UTF-8 extended…

I figured it out. You need 1 widget per each type (category, page, post).

Why not use CF7’s quizz option?

I did use it (see 1s msg), but it was 1+2=3 style. Right now i’m not going to experiment (school run in 5 and school holidays in 3 days, and the other person working with the site is already having school holidays – tough days ;)). But I’m really glad to have material to read and reflect and when I have time I’l going to change things to the look I like and maybe even experiment a little.

Cookies thick looks like the nice thing, I have to think a little bit whether it might cause a problem with my provider. Other one – there are a lot of complains after last upgrade.

Another thing, maybe somebody knows. The problem started after we had several legitimate visits from some forum, not straight away but several hours later. I wanted to check what that forum is. Google webmaster tools doesn’t see it giving backlinks, but analytics shows that I’ve got referral traffic. You have to register and write some message to see what’s on that forum (didn’t write enough yet). Well, and after I’ve got this spam problem. Which made me really suspicious about this forum. Now I’m checking it through whois and getting “no IP, no provider”. How it’s possible?!?

Yes and I’m changing QUIZ to CAPCHA