Tong Family

Well for sure I’ve been having incredible problems with redirect loops. The symptom is the site just keeps looping with problems. This first started with iThemes Security where I had:

1. The subsites kept redirecting back to the main site with the message that user creation was not available. They had really strange referrer URLs.
2. Then when I tried to run salt the tables, I got redirect errors and couldn’t logon to anything. Sigh.

Hard to figure out what is wrong, so better just to run a full rebuild. I probably should have just paid for their iThemes Security Platinum which handles this. Sigh! The site says that it works. But I would be careful about running it from the main site.

I might end up giving some other security plugin’s a try like Kinsta recommends or just stick with JetPack.

So here are some notes on debugging this with DigitalOcean:

1. After every major change. Stop the droplet and then do a snapshot. This lets you get back to where you were.
2. Make sure that when you have redirect loops, you clear the browser cache. The caching of cookies can be a real problem. And the behavior is pretty strange. You can get redirect loops, you can get login failures.
3. I have found that quitting Chrome after you clear the cache can help.

There might also be a problem with caching. I had that with Bluehost, so be careful what you use. I didn’t use WP-Cache but things seem fine with JetPack caching.

There is a great site called Redirect Checker (http://www.redirect-checker.org/) which lets you see the problem. For me, it is temporary 302 redirects. You can also look at /var/log/apache2/error.log to see the same thing.

Finally with JetPack and Multiuser WordPress, there seems to constantly be a I can’t make a connection icon on, but the connection works fine, so this seems superious.