adminCP broken

[LiquidFractal]

Hey everyone,

OK, so I go to log in to my site and I discover that my adminCP CSS is broken.  No page formatting - everything loads as ugly raw HTML bullet-point lists and nothing works - I cannot do any back-end development as a result.

I have not changed the adminCP theme at all (I never do).  THe only thing I've done is install a new 4.5.3 theme, which I do not use for the adminCP whatsoever.  The only other thing I think I've done has been to use the Support function, which cleared the cache (which has caused this problem in the past - it shouldn't, I know - but it always ultimately reloads until now).

As one can no longer submit critical or important support tickets, and this current ZenDesk request has sat for 3+ hours with no response, I'm hoping someone who has experience this can be of assistance?  Perhaps there's a file in which I can set the default theme or something in the hopes that it helps?  Or something I can do to rebuild the cache (since it seems to be a formatting/CSS related thing!?!).  I'm really just guessing as I have no idea what went wrong (adminCP was working fine yesterday).  Rebooted my VPS as well, to no avail.

Thanks!

[Dean_]

4 hours ago, liquidfractal said:

Hey everyone,

OK, so I go to log in to my site and I discover that my adminCP CSS is broken.  No page formatting - everything loads as ugly raw HTML bullet-point lists and nothing works - I cannot do any back-end development as a result.

I have not changed the adminCP theme at all (I never do).  THe only thing I've done is install a new 4.5.3 theme, which I do not use for the adminCP whatsoever.  The only other thing I think I've done has been to use the Support function, which cleared the cache (which has caused this problem in the past - it shouldn't, I know - but it always ultimately reloads until now).

As one can no longer submit critical or important support tickets, and this current ZenDesk request has sat for 3+ hours with no response, I'm hoping someone who has experience this can be of assistance?  Perhaps there's a file in which I can set the default theme or something in the hopes that it helps?  Or something I can do to rebuild the cache (since it seems to be a formatting/CSS related thing!?!).  I'm really just guessing as I have no idea what went wrong (adminCP was working fine yesterday).  Rebooted my VPS as well, to no avail.

Thanks!

It's the weekend so responses are delayed on SR.

I'm going to guess this is still the same bug that has plagued the system since 4.x.x was released. So, with in mind, I'll try to replicate the steps I did in order to get the CSS back.

If you can navigate pressing the highlighted links, go to Themes, and try to find the link that will enable 'DESIGNER MODE' let it run, and it should refresh the page. This should hopefully fix the issue, then turn off DESIGNERS MODE.

 

[Runar]

6 minutes ago, Dean_ said:

If you can navigate pressing the highlighted links, go to Themes, and try to find the link that will enable 'DESIGNER MODE' let it run, and it should refresh the page. This should hopefully fix the issue, then turn off DESIGNERS MODE.

And if you can't navigate or find the link, try to add this to your website URL to go directly to the Designers' Mode page:

/admin/?app=core&module=customization&controller=themes&do=designersmode

[LiquidFractal]

Thanks to everyone for their responses.  I did mention the time because usually Invision respond pretty quick to my tickets regardless of day of the week.  But no real gripes on that count anyway (although it was an urgent request and strangely it's been more than 24 hrs. and no reply...)

I actually managed to navigate my way back to the Support page and click the option that gets to clearing the cache.  That seems to have reset things and the formatting has returned (thankfully!).

I actually get this problem intermittently: I go to Support and when the cache clears, and I try to return to the adminCP Dashboard but all my formatting instantly tanks.  I have to sign out and sign back in to the adminCP in order to return to the Support page. 😞 That usually clears it up but this time for some reason it was persisting.

So others have had this issue too?  Interesting.  I thought maybe it was because I'm on a VPS and not the cloud, but just guessing.

Edited October 5, 2020 by liquidfractal

[FZ]

This has happened to me over the weekend too and I am tracing the problem back to Invision maxing out my allotted storage space when rebuilding thumbnails that got "broken" after upgrading to 4.5. Somehow this system is managing to write massive amounts of disk space when using the rebuilding tools and obviously not removing the old thumbnails when it does so. This then results in ACP not working because the system can't write to it once your disk space is used up and the entire caching gets screwed up. 

Seriously, seriously PO'd with IPS right now. I will never trust this upgrading process again. 😠

 

Edited October 5, 2020 by FZ

[FZ]

My site is now totalled after this 4.5 upgrade. The ACP has used up all the available disk space after running rebuilds and now I am in the advanced support queue. What makes it even more critical is that they want me to confirm FTP account details are correct before they can fix it. Hello? Once you have exceeded your disk space cPanel will not let you FTP to the account. So now I guess I am well and truly stuffed. 

I cannot believe that this "upgrade" has caused so many problems for me. What a GIANT abortion of a software upgrade. 4 days of my life have been wasted trying to get my site back to where it was before this happened. 

[LiquidFractal]

@FZThis looks different, and much more serious than what I was experiencing (I got no error messages; my CSS just tanked).  I'm sure you've already logged a support ticket with Invision, which is the only advice I could give.  Good luck!

[Noble~]

10 hours ago, FZ said:

My site is now totalled after this 4.5 upgrade. The ACP has used up all the available disk space after running rebuilds and now I am in the advanced support queue. What makes it even more critical is that they want me to confirm FTP account details are correct before they can fix it. Hello? Once you have exceeded your disk space cPanel will not let you FTP to the account. So now I guess I am well and truly stuffed. 

I cannot believe that this "upgrade" has caused so many problems for me. What a GIANT abortion of a software upgrade. 4 days of my life have been wasted trying to get my site back to where it was before this happened. 

Do you have any daily backup's running on your server that could roll back to?

[FZ]

2 hours ago, Noble~ said:

Do you have any daily backup's running on your server that could roll back to?

There are, but then I would have to go through the whole upgrade process again, which will cost me another week of my time. 

IPS need to fix this. I am sure I won't be the only one who experiences this kind of thing. There's something seriously wrong with the system if it adds more than 15GB when rebuilding thumbnails on a site that was under 50GB in size before this happened. I actually suspect that the process was halted on both occasions because the system couldn't write to disk anymore. 

[bfarber]

I have no idea why you'd be seeing an issue like you're describing and would have to recommend if you haven't submitted a ticket to do so.

[FZ]

18 minutes ago, bfarber said:

I have no idea why you'd be seeing an issue like you're describing and would have to recommend if you haven't submitted a ticket to do so.

Got 2 tickets. One for the original issue of broken thumbnails and the other for the resultant chaos that happened when rebuilding them. 

[FZ]

I'm growing more and more disillusioned with my situation. It's day 4 now and still no signs of rescuing my site from whatever 4.5 has done to it. I have calculated that rebuilding the thumbnails (twice, because the first time it failed when reaching the disk cap) has added over 20GB of disk space to a site that was using about 38GB prior to 4.5. 

This has by far been the very worst upgrade experience I have had with Invision since buying it in 2011. 

[Matt]

Just for those reading, I'm working with FZ on their site.

The core issue is that the thumbnails being generated by PHP and GD are currently larger than the originals (in some cases 300% larger!), due to the image quality being set to 100.

I've been testing out various percentages and around 85% is the sweet spot and is now generating thumbnails less than the original (around 50% or less) with no real noticeable drop in quality.

100% tries very hard to preserve images, including artefacts caused by the compression of the original.

[FZ]

1 minute ago, Matt said:

Just for those reading, I'm working with FZ on their site.

The core issue is that the thumbnails being generated by PHP and GD are currently larger than the originals (in some cases 300% larger!), due to the image quality being set to 100.

I've been testing out various percentages and around 85% is the sweet spot and is now generating thumbnails less than the original (around 50% or less) with no real noticeable drop in quality.

100% tries very hard to preserve images, including artefacts caused by the compression of the original.

Thank you, Matt for coming to the rescue. 

I unfortunately don't have knowledge deep enough on these sorts of issues to understand fully how it happened, but hopefully others reading about this dilemma will not make the same mistake I did. 

[Matt]

No problem, it's what we're here for. 🙂