Comments on: Popularity Contest: Wordpress Plugin Hall of Shame

By: Bonochromatic

Bonochromatic — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:53:36 +0000

Great post. I too have had significant problems with Popularity Contest, including the ones you’ve mentioned in this blog. After enabling the plugin, my entire blog just went blank – not even an error message, just a totally blank page on all admin pages and front-end pages. Crazy!

I finally installed it by clearing out the old Popularity Contest DB tables (although the installation had a “fatal error” upon installation it still “worked”) – and once I was able to get it functioning I found that it didn’t seem to work with WP-Supercache and was using MASSIVE amounts of my server’s resources!

After reviewing Alex King’s blog, my conclusion is this – the guy is just arrogant, and that’s all there is to it. What he SHOULD do is let Popularity Contest die gracefully so that another hacker (or team of hackers) can pick up where he left off and make the plugin work better – it’s a great idea, but as long as his Popularity Contest plugin is out there, nobody’s going to sit down and make a better one.

I too, am removing Popularity Contest from my blog, for all the reasons you’ve mentioned, and then some, although unfortunately I’ve heavily integrated it into my site’s theme, which means that removal is going to be a lot harder than simply deactivating the plugin.

Thanks for opening our eyes to this plugin’s nefarious ways! Hall of Shame, indeed.

By: wrench

wrench — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:25:08 +0000

I use Popularity contest and I am glad I found this before attempting an upgrade. BTW, Alex King is also the author of the ligit plugin, which I also had issues with.
I understand that no software is perfect and will have bugs or deficiencies. It is inexcusable to a) introduce issues (using wp_die) b) be flippant when dealing with you clients. They ARE you clients even if they do not pay you directly.

By: dave

dave — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 21:14:23 +0000

I’m pretty sure you can safely drop those tables if you are done with the plugin.

By: slobjones

slobjones — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:59:52 +0000

I’ve uninstalled the Popularity Contest plugin but noticed it apparently left behind two tables titled wp_ak_popularity and wp_ak_popularity_options.

Can I safely drop these tables?

By: Vince

Vince — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:04:10 +0000

To be honest, what Alex did is almost like killing our blog. I am not a techie person, and I could have start all over again without knowing the problem.

I do hope that you will be more like a righteous man Alex. It’s a good thing that I discovered it and tried to do some research and I’ve known Dave. If not, I could have deleted and kill my 1 year old blog. What you did is not just right.

By: dave

dave — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:15:28 +0000

Vince, you have a few options but all of them involved accessing the file system of your server box, either via ssh/telnet or some kind of web interface. I’ll assume you are able to do that with your web host if you were able to install the plugin in the first place.

1) You could physically move the entire directory with the plugin to somewhere else. It currently lives in /wp-content/plugins . If you move it anywhere else, like your home directory or /tmp that should get your blog at least functioning again.

2) If you open the popularity_contest.php (sorry, I deleted all this stuff so I don’t know the exact names anymore) and find the line with the wp-die command in it, just add the characters

in front of that and it will stop happening.

3) If you have access to your database, you can drop the table wp_ak_popularity_options (the command “show tables” will give you the names of everything if it has a different prefix than wp_ on your system.) From mysql:

drop table wp_ak_popularity_options;

If you do that, it will try to install.

4) There is a newer version of the plugin available that if you can install by hand over the old one is reported to fix this issue.

I hope one of those options works for you. It sucks, I know.

By: Vince

Vince — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:51:41 +0000

Hello there!!! I am having the same problem. What do you mean by “commenting out wp_die”? You mean erasing this code?

Please do help. My site is totally blank and I can no longer access anything including the my admin page, log in page, etc…. grrrr… I wish I did not installed this plugin.

By: dave

dave — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:21:04 +0000

Alex, You didn’t have to guess if you actually looked at your own code. Multiple people reported the issue and you kneejerk sent them all elsewhere rather than checking your own logic. You can’t both excuse this as a beta and also have it in the plugin automatic upgrades. If it isn’t ready, don’t put it in there.

nogeek, glad I could help.

Shannon, I think most of the time you should be getting the SuperCache version

By: Shannon

Shannon — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:32:53 +0000

Hmmm – and now your blog page even loads faster…
sln

By: nogeek

nogeek — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:39:28 +0000

you saved my time man.. thanks alot. wp_die is too much for this isnt it ?

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:42:40 +0000

Actually, I tried to reproduce this 3 times and never could. My guess at the cause was a MySQL permissions issue that was causing the ALTER statement to fail, but that’s why I sent folks to the HelpCenter, so they could get support. It’s a beta, betas have bugs.

Thanks for your contributions to Open Source.