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Folks, I need help. Please!
I’m traveling in some wild areas right now, with iffy wifi connections. Here’s what’s happened yesterday and today. I’m not sure if it’s my bad connections, or if something else is going on.
Last night, I opened my website and found the Main Menu bar had disappeared. Only thing showing was “Home.” So, I went into my Appearances/Menu section and methodically restored the entire menu bar. All looked good as I went to bed.
When I first logged in this morning, everything seemed fine. I happened to get an email from Christine (as part of her network) about her new URL, and I made that change on my site. Everything still seemed fine.
Tonight, logging in for the first time in 8 hours, I find:
1. No menu bar whatsoever. Just “Home”. It’s supposed to show this: Birds (A-M), Birds (N-Z), Beasts, Bugs, Plants, Places (A-M), Places (N-Z).
2. No Soliloquy slide show on the Home page. It was there this morning. Where has it gone? Or is it just my lousy wifi connection that makes it invisible?
3. At the bottom of the Home page, there’s a looooong string of text having something to do with Christine’s website being moved, etc. None of this means anything to me. Is anybody else seeing this too?
So, friends, I need to ask somebody to please check http://bestnaturestock.com/ and let me know if you see my Birds, Beasts, etc. menu, or just “Home.” Do you see a slide show on the home page? At the very bottom, do you see a bunch of text about Christine’s URL move?
I need to know if this is just because I have a lousy connection right now, or if my website has gone goofy on me.
Thanks for your input!
Try to deactivate the Syxtra plugin and see if that helps.
Thanks for that advice, Redneck. Glad to know it’s not just my bad wifi, although that might be an easier thing to cope with.
I took your advice and deactivated SYxtra. The results are visible on the site now: http://bestnaturestock.com/
The slide show has reappeared. Hooray! And the misc info about Christine’s URL move has disappeared from the bottom. That’s great!
But the Menu bar still shows just “Home.” I’ll have to redo the menu items I had in the footer, and also figure out a way to make the nice PayPal graphic I had on every image page show up there. Those aren’t critical things to lose, but…
Why would the presence or absence of that plugin suddenly change my site? I hadn’t upgraded to the latest version. Hadn’t touched the plugins at all.
I’m really baffled about this!
You might want to try a temporary fix. Take Christine’s website off your networking partners list and the re-activate the Syxtra plugin. I believe Christine’s domain has changed and that’s causing trouble in combination with the Syxtra plugin. But I’m checking this on my iPhone so I’m very limited at giving advice.
Thanks, Redneck, for your suggestion. It sounded like a good one so I did it. But… the site goes back to the status quo ante. No slide. No menu. And Christine’s long info at the bottom.
So, I’ll deactive SYX again and go back to at least having a slide show and no stuff at the bottom.
Tomorrow is another day! 🙂
I just visited your site:
The slide show is there but your menu is gone (except for home).I am sorry for your troubles and hope you get it all sorted out and fixed soon.
@Imago Borealis wrote:
I just visited your site:
The slide show is there but your menu is gone (except for home).I am sorry for your troubles and hope you get it all sorted out and fixed soon.
Thanks, Imago Borealis. You’re seeing the same thing I am. As soon as I figure out why the menu bar disappeared, I hope to get it all back. That menu is the most important thing, obviously, and the fact that it disappeared twice in two days must point to something. I’m just not sure what.
If anybody else has any thoughts or suggestions, please shoot ’em out!
How does your backend look? Have all your menu configurations disappeared there as well?
If yes, it’d mean that that info gets somehow lost from your WP database where it should be stored. This in turn means that either your database is corrupted or that some weird process deletes/disables that info in your WP database.
Maybe you can revert to a database backup from before this started to happen and see what happens. Obviously, you would loose your work done on your site since then, though.
Maybe just peeking into your current database and comparing relevant tables with a backup version gives some clues, IF you feel comfortable doing that.
I am just brain-storming here …
I don’t have a clue what caused the menus to disappear, but I did check your site and it appears that all your categories are intact (if you navigate to
http://bestnaturestock.com/image-categories/
You can see images in individual categories too (I tried a couple of them – you have a lot though!).
I see the PayPal graphic on each image page – do you not see that?
Your whole portfolio says 1017 images – does that sound right?
http://bestnaturestock.com/image/
I was wondering if that was an old total and if so perhaps it would give a clue as to when things went haywire.
Yes, jsnover, you’re right that all my images and categories are intact. Thank heavens for that! And thank you so much for checking it out.
I hadn’t actually navigated to one of my images pages, but you’re right: the PayPal logo is still there too. That’s odd since I thought I’d put that into position using the SYXtra plugin, which is currently disabled. So that’s happy news, too.
What really has me puzzled, though, is my Mysterious Disappearing Menus. Two days in a row, my menu bar has vanished, along with almost all the categories that made it up. I restored it night before last (as I said earlier), it was there yesterday moroning, then last night it was gone again.
Fortunately, the images are all still associated with their categories, so I don’t have to redo everything. And the Image Categories still exist too. They just have vanished from the Category Menu.
I noted before going to bed last night that the tick-box at the bottom of the Appearance/Menus page didn’t have anything checked. When I checked that, it did restore the partial menu that is left. What I saw on my home page was the same as I see on my Menu page: Birds A-M but only through the B category. No other main category or sub cat shows. They’ve all disappeared again. (BTW, the very appearance of my Menu Bar page is different from how it looked when I started this project. Not sure that matters, just making note of it.)
So, something is “eating” the category organization on my menu structure page.
Two possibilities:
Do I have too many categories and sub cats for the system to cope with it? I do have a lot (with more planned to come), but there have been no problems up til now.
I just crossed the 1,000 images threshhold 2 days ago. Now have 1,017 up, as you saw. Somewhere recently I read on on of the threads that there’s a reset of some sort after you reach the 1000 level (for pages? for images? I can’t remember). So is it possible that’s what happened? Have I somehow been “reset”?
I can take the time to rebuild my full taxonomy of categories, as I did 2 nights ago. But it takes a long time, and I don’t want to do that only to see the whole thing vanish again.
Yikes, this is just so odd!
I did a quick search and it appears this is a known issue. I have no idea if this is the whole story, but check out these articles
http://sevenspark.com/wordpress/menu-item-limit
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/the-menu-has-a-limit-of-49-links-of-pages-in-the-navbarsyxtra 1.9.9 should be ok with that disappearing sites. Yet before the update take care of your Symbio core.
Disappearing menus are certainly the native WP issue.@jsnover wrote:
I did a quick search and it appears this is a known issue. I have no idea if this is the whole story, but check out these articles
http://sevenspark.com/wordpress/menu-item-limit
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/the-menu-has-a-limit-of-49-links-of-pages-in-the-navbarYep! That’s the answer, right there. I just read the first link info, not yet gotten to the 2nd, but you’ve nailed it right on.
Here’s the relevant text from your first link:
So why does this happen suddenly and without warning?
Sometimes this issue manifests as a user reaching a simple limit: they’ve added 50 menu items. They try to add the 51st, and nothing happens if they’re adding it at the end. Or if they add it in the middle, the last menu item is dropped. The limit is 50, so every time they add X more items, the last X are deleted.
Much more distressing is the case where a user has happily had 120 menu items for the last month. Then, one fateful day, they go to manage their menu, as they have new content they wish to add. Upon adding their 121st menu item and saving, they find that suddenly, to their horror, the last 40 menu items have been deleted. How could that happen? The POST vars limit should have prevented them from adding 120 menu items in the first place, right?
So, now… Thanks to jsnover, I do know what’s happening. That part in boldface exactly describes my situation.
Now I’m wondering if a quick call to the friendly techies at Bluehost — to explain what’s happened and ask if they can set my quota of menu items higher — would do the trick. It worked that way when I was having a problem uploading images larger than 10mb. Maybe it could work that way with this???
Worth a try. I’ll do it and get back to let ya’ll know what the word is.
And again… thank you, jsnover. Your help is much appreciated!
Just one additional FYI note, before I call the techies.
I just counted the number of category and subcategory menu items that my site seems to wantto allow me. It’s 19 items (Birds A through B). Not even close to the total I had up 2 days ago or what I’d like to have going forward. I may be totally unable to set up my site the way I want it. Wow.
Now to call the techies…
Wow!!! There may be some legit complaints about Bluehost’s service, but I gotta say: this is the 3rd time I’ve called them with problems that baffled me, and each time the tech support has promptly and accurately solved my problem.
This guy had not heard about the WP menu-limit situation. He excused himself for a few minutes while he searched the database and consulted with another support person. Then he came back on, asked me to add a few menu items to my site to see what would happen. I was able to add them w/o difficullty.
What he did was add a new php line in the Home Directory to up the menu limit to its max of 9,000 items. Waaaaay more than even I will ever need. He then walked me into the back files to show me where he had made that change. I could lower it if I wanted to, but he said that’s probably the max possible. I’m leaving it set where it is.
So now my menu bar is already starting to take shape again. I’m going to start rebuilding it again, and if all goes well this should give me back the site I wanted. (You can see the improvement already: http://bestnaturestock.com/)
Thanks again, jsnover, for pointing me in the right direction. Having read that first link, I was able to explain to the support guy what had happened. Not sure I’d have known enough otherwise to explain it for him to understand.
QUESTION FOR MODERATOR: Should we retitle this thread to be more specific and useful, perhaps “Disappearing Menu Items” ? Others may hit this problem in the future, so perhaps this will help somebody else down the road.
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