Abigailm

Donna, it seems to be PHP error. Zulok has posted a suggested fix here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/syntax-error-in-social-buttons-php-in-evolve-3-7-4/

I did NOT have any problem on my site. My site is running PHP 7.1.6.

HeavenlyTreasure —

There is a plugin called WP Rollback that makes it very easy to restore previous versions of plugins and themes. You can find it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-rollback/

Once you install it, if you navigate on your dashboard to Appearance > Themes and then click “Theme Details” for Evolve (or any other free wordpress theme) — you will see a small “rollback” button in the lower right corner. Clicking that link will bring up a list of available versions. That plugin draws directly from the Subversion repository — so it would simply be downloading and automatically installing the same theme that is at the link provided by LeapFroggie.

In general — especially with the Evolve theme, but as good practice for everything — if you are upgrading themes or plugins on a live site, you should always back up the site first. There are many different good, free backup or database management plugins you can choose from. (Evolve is a complex theme with many different features and display options — I think it is very powerful theme and well supported, amazing for a free theme, but also more things that can go wrong when it is upgraded).

@svtx, I am another user who has also experienced the same problem with multiple web sites that I manage. It is a caching problem when there is 3rd party caching software installed. In my experience it only occurs when the SpamShield plugin is updated, but in order to stay effective against Spam, the plugin is updated quite regularly and frequently.

Because the plugin relies on javascript that is called from every page with a comment form, when the plugin updates, there ends up being a conflict between the cached page and the updated script.

I have experimented with a variety of different cache settings but nothing I tried seemed to resolve the problem.

I have recently changed to a different caching plugin on all of my sites, but the problem persists. (I was using WP Super Cache but am now using WP Fastest Cache) So it really isn’t specific to any one plugin.

Here is what I have done to keep full functionality:

1) Disabled auto-updates of WP SpamShield. (I manually update instead)
2) Manually clear cache immediately after the update.

I agree with you that this is an annoyance, particularly if you have a lot of sites to manage – and I would not install the SpamShield plugin on any site that I was not maintaining on my own for that reason.

I did submit a feature request for WP Fastest Cache about a week ago asking that the developer add the ability to automatically clear the cache whenever specified plugins update — and the reply was that the feature “may” be added — so you might want to follow that as well. (See https://wordpress.org/support/topic/feature-request-clear-cache-with-plugin-updates/)

I think it would also be possible for the SpamShield plugin to include a function in the script that would would automatically clear the cache on a site upon activation or update to the plugin, but of course each separate common caching program would need a separate function coded. (I know that it can be done for WP Fastest Cache, as that is documented at http://www.wpfastestcache.com/tutorial/delete-the-cache-by-calling-the-function/ — but I don’t know about other caching plugins.)

So yes .. this is an annoyance — but I don’t know any other anti-spam plugin that works as consistently well as SpamShield — so it’s come down to whether it is more annoying to have to deal with manually clearing caches on upgrade, or to have to deal with manually reading and deleting all the comment spam that other plugins allow through.

I would repeat my earlier suggestion that with the next upgrade, WP-Spamshield be modified to:

A. Provide setting option to disable display of the WP security warning*
B. Suppress security warnings if latest version of WP is already installed.

*I’d note that this particular alert is only useful on sites that are not being regularly updated. Users who have WordPress set to auto-update and/or are using other security software like Wordfence to monitor for updates don’t need the added function.