I have been having spam attacks recently that corrupted my rss feeds and rendered them useless for feed aggregators. I tried to solve this problem by reuploading all admin and include files but the spam attacks continued (too lazy to play with .htaccess for so many files). It was then that I decided to upgrade to Wordpress 2.6.

Big mistake!!!

Well not actually a mistake as I succeeded in doing it but a lot of my (precious) time got wasted over the aftermath.

It started with me downloading my contents folder to save my themes, plugins and uploads. Then I uploaded all WP files except the contents folder to my server. I ran the upgrade script, went to my login page and, lo and behold, it refused to recognize me as a user, let alone administrator!

Obviously, I went nuts. I tried resetting the password but it refused to log me in again. Then I tried to do it the hard way by editing my database directly. I made a script to find out the md5 code of any random character, put the code into my database and tried to log in. Still the same.

Heart-broken, I started searching frantically for a solution and what I found out was so damn annoying that there are no G-Rated words for it.

The solution was to simply “clear your saved history and files“!

I did it and the new WP 2.6 Login page appeared. But as I mentioned above, I had edited my database directly and my old password was no more, only some stupid character in md5 code (read: illegible) format.

But, thankfully, I had stored my old password code in a file so getting back up on my feet was no problem.

Now who the heck is to blame for this episode: Wordpress or Mozilla Firefox?

Tags: blues, database, feed aggregator, firefox, md5, mozilla firefox, rss, script, spam, upgrade, upgrading wordpress, wordpress, wordpress 2.6