andrew2968

Grr, still no luck. There’s no php.ini present. I deleted .htaccess and recreated it with Settings > Permalinks. My sysadmin “confirmed [we’re using the new server] using the trace route”.

We have a site backup, so his next thought is to do a manual update of WordPress tonight on a shot-in-the-dark theory that that will get it to check the current PHP version. We’re sort of grasping at straws at this point.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by andrew2968.

@faisalahammad No luck with that so far. My sysadmin and I both assumed that would work, but alas.

@jamesmarsland The SiteWorx domain panel shows our domain’s PHP version as 8.3.11. Would the host check something different?

@alanfuller @matthiaspabst @bcworkz I really appreciate you and the plugin team taking the time to reply. I definitely agree with the team in principle. My remaining worry is along the lines of Alan’s, that various classes of users may be at a loss when an unexpectedly large change happens.

Related to that, I wouldn’t mind seeing a “recalibration” of the prominence of old versions of plugins. I get the sense they’re purposefully tucked away to discourage reversion (one has to know to go to the plugin page, click Advanced View, scroll to the bottom, download the older version without being able to see its changelog, and upload/replace by FTP), when another option might be to have reversion functionality within the /wp-admin/plugins.php interface. And I’m not a developer myself let alone a security practices expert, but as someone responsible for multiple WP installs and who has to choose whether and when to update a plugin, I’m not sure I see a significant difference in value between an old version with a known security issue and a new version with inevitable unknown security issues.

Lastly, as a practical matter, the team’s suggestion that “People can stop using the plugin or switch to another plugin” often isn’t, well, practical. For many users at least. I’m sure that’s a common objection. Plugins become “sticky” as people build their sites and practices around them, and people often choose one plugin over another because it does something no other plugin offers. What’s that term from economics…friction? There’s a lot of friction in changing plugins, some big costs, whether you’re a single user, small internal team, or big external audience that have come to rely on certain functionality.

Anyway, thank you all again for letting me reboot a debate that’s been going on since the 1970s. 🙂