Need plugin help - Support won't help

[Square Wheels]

I have been having problems getting plugins to work.  No matter how many times I tell support that I don't think the issue is with an individual plugin, but with my plugin system in general, they just tell me it's an issue with the plugin and ask the developer.  I have two licences, and often buy plugins twice and install them on both forums.  I never have any issues with any plugins on one site, and almost always have problems installing / upgrading / removing plugins on the other site.

These continued problems make me believe that the issue is with my install, or there is something "broken" about my plugin system.  It is very frustrating to be stuck in the middle.  I ask IPS for help with the plugin system, and they do not listen and blame the developer of the plugin.  I concede and ask the developer and they say it must be an issue with IPS because no one else has these issues.  I've also asked IPS to look at the error logs, but they don't.  I don't know what the info in the error logs holds, but I presume it could be helpful.

I am ready to give up and remove every plugin and see if I can start over.  After I delete all of them (assuming I can, I presume I'll get errors and won't be able to), what else should I try and clean up?  Are there files I need to ensure are deleted?  Are there database tables that need to be cleaned out?

Support suggested I change permissions for the plugins folder and the datastore folder from 755 to 777.  I did, but the problems persists.

If I delete all of the plugins, should the plugins folder then be empty?  Are files stored anywhere else?

The datastore folder has tons of files in it named things like 0e8dd58ab7bcd733217031ac8188b35c_email_html.0c0fbee8d6.php.  What are these files?  Should they be there?

Thanks for any guidance you can offer, I feel left on my own trying to guess what might be wrong.

[Square Wheels]

Anyone?

[tAPir]

Do you have a test site? If not make one with fresh software and make a copy of your database and then you can delete things from that to see if you break anything. Also, are these errors with the default theme or another?

[Square Wheels]

1 minute ago, tAPir said:

Do you have a test site? If not make one with fresh software and make a copy of your database and then you can delete things from that to see if you break anything.

I do not, this is a good idea.  Maybe if I can get it to work on the test site, I could simply move that over as the live site?

2 minutes ago, tAPir said:

Also, are these errors with the default theme or another?

I have several themes, it happens with all of them.

[tAPir]

No, what I meant is - Do the errors happen in the default theme? If so suspect the plugin. If not suspect the other theme.

[Square Wheels]

1 minute ago, tAPir said:

No, what I meant is - Do the errors happen in the default theme? If so suspect the plugin. If not suspect the other theme.

Actually, I misspoke.  The errors are theme independent.  They happen when I try to add or remove a plugin in the ACP.  It is not plugin dependent, but support just tells me to ask the authors of the plugins.  The authors of the plugins say it's not them, it must be the core install / files.

I like the idea of a clean install, I will give that a try over the weekend.

Any suggestions on how to do a clean install, import all of my members / topics / calendar items / files?  I don't want to use the existing database or existing files as I believe there is something corrupt there.  The site is for fun only, so I am not worried about Google or any other search bot losing the links.  I do have a lot of pics (about 6GB) and a few hundred thousand posts.

[Adriano Faria]

15 minutes ago, Square Wheels said:

The authors of the plugins say it's not them, it must be the core install / files.

And this is right. It will be a plugin issue if any error happens AFTER you press tge button on popup to install the plugin. Before that is a CORE issue.

Take a look on this: 

Related?

[Square Wheels]

6 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Related?

Similar maybe?  Not sure.  Support told that user it would be fixed in 4.1.12.

Again, I have most of the same plugins installed on another site that is on another server.  In particular, if I install Member's Country I cannot access the ACP at all, I get an error and support has to remove it for me.  It works perfectly fine on my other site, yet support says to ask the author (umm, you ).

[Adriano Faria]

Member's Country is the issue?

It requires an active licence, since IPS GeoLocation is available to current customers.

The error on ACP ia due to that. I will release a fix today later for this.

[Square Wheels]

3 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Member's Country is the issue?

No, I don't think it's an issue at all.  I had it on both of my sites, and both of my sites have an active license.  When I installed it on the problem site (license may have been inactive at the time, can't remember), it caused an error in the ACP so that no part of the ACP could be accessed.  Support removed it.

Both of my licences are now active.

Now if I try to install any plugin it usually gets stuck installing.  I refresh the page, it it looks like it is there.  I set settings and it looks like they take.  Then users get error messages so I try to uninstall it.  The plugin page gets stuck on Loading and it won't remove the plugin.  

It doesn't seem to matter what plugin I try to add / remove.  I am convinced it is not any individual plugin or author, but something got corrupt either with my files or database.  Since I can't seem to figure it out and support can't dedicate the time to figuring it out (I kind of understand), I like the idea of importing the data into a fresh install.  Now I just need to figure out how to make that work.  Maybe install another software and import into that, then import back into IPS?

[tnn]

Are these sites located on different servers?

[Square Wheels]

23 minutes ago, tnn said:

Are these sites located on different servers?

Yes