Fixed Database: WordPress Installer Appears Instead of Blog

Even though my blog has been installed for many years, today I was treated to the “Welcome to WordPress” installation page, asking me to enter a Blog Title and my E-mail address.

I logged into the FTP server to find an 11.3 MB error_log file in my blog directory.

I downloaded it to find interesting errors like these:

[15-Aug-2009 11:39:02] PHP Warning:  fsockopen() [<a href=’function.fsockopen’>function.fsockopen</a>]: unable to connect to twitter.com:80 (Connection timed out) in /home/mike/public_html/intelliot.com/blog/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 1142

[15-Aug-2009 11:39:02] PHP Warning:  fsockopen() [<a href=’function.fsockopen’>function.fsockopen</a>]: unable to connect to twitter.com:80 (Connection timed out) in /home/mike/public_html/intelliot.com/blog/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 1142

[15-Aug-2009 13:46:32] WordPress database error Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation ‘=’ for query SELECT comment_ID FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = ‘941’ AND ( comment_author = ‘KBAHTAa’ OR comment_author_email = ‘allsms777 [at] gmail.com’ ) AND comment_content = ‘<a href=\”http://www…

I searched my database for the domain part of the spam URL (which I cut out of the above quote) and found a row in the comments table (and a couple other tables, too). I deleted them all. I also found that the wp_options table had crashed and needed to be repaired. So I repaired and optimized all of my tables.

That fixed things partially, but there were lots of “Hello World” posts and comments — the ones that WordPress creates when it finishes installation. It turns out that people had actually gone through the blog install process 11 times, so there were 11 posts and comments for me to delete.

Now that’s done, and things seem to be back to normal. If anything seems to have gone haywire, let me know!

2 Responses to “Fixed Database: WordPress Installer Appears Instead of Blog”

  1. Adam Dempsey says:

    Was that running the latest version of WordPress?

    If so you may want to file a bug!

  2. Flick says:

    That would be one of my WordPress nightmares. This ol’ laptop can’t really handle opening large text files of error logs … let alone 11 Mb – I’d have had to use the filesplitter. Glad it all got sorted though :)

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