Finally after almost three long days and a small army of help it feels like, my website is once again available for safe and easy viewing.
On Tuesday morning I sat down at my computer and opened my website, only to find a glaring red screen looking back at me with the words, ‘Deceptive Website Warning’ written in large white letters. The words, ‘Are you kidding me?!’ May or may not have crossed my mind in that moment. Followed swiftly by thoughts of ‘What could possibly be on my site that would have triggered this kind of response?’ It was so closely attached to my site that I couldn’t even access my administrator page without encountering the warning. Which since I didn’t know what had caused the problem, whether a mistake I had made or some kind of malicious attack, I was uncomfortable risking entering into the site before having some kind of answer.
And so my three days of insanity and research began….. I tried everything I could think of and everything I could find. I tried multiple device. I restarted said devices. I cleared caches. I double checked all of my device settings and no change. At that point I figured that it probably wasn’t just a technical glitch that only I was seeing. I tried to think of things I could have done or plugins that I could have downloaded that would have caused the problem. By Tuesday afternoon I gave up trying to find it solely on my own and I reached out to WordPress virtual assistant. After waiting entirely too long for it to connect me with a human, I reached out to someone at WordPress I had worked with before to see if they could direct me to any answers. Then I waited to hear back.
While I was waiting I continued trying to figure out what could be going on. It finally occurred to me Tuesday night that I might still be able to get into the site, at least on the administration side, if I went through the Jackpack app. Victory! I got in. I began to search for something, anything, that would clue me in to what the problem could be. The only thing that seemed odd to me what that there was a few changes that said that had been made by an unknown user. I didn’t know if that could be the problem or not, but I went ahead and reset the website to an earlier time, right after the last entry that showed me making a change. And nothing. I sent a report to Google, telling them that everything was safe as far as I could tell.
Wednesday morning dawned and I quickly checked to see if there were any changes. Nothing. I had a message from one person at WordPress, offering me a list of things that I could try to fix it. I went through the list. Some things I had already done, others I didn’t even know what they were. So then I had to look those things up and try to understand them and try to fix things. No change. I reached out through the virtual assistant and got ahold of a person this time. Yay! But after several minutes of looking things over, they had no answers either. Told me that they would escalate it to try and get someone to figure it out. Later I got another email from WordPress telling me that they had looked the site over and hadn’t found any problems. So, now I was down to, this is a Google issue.
Next I worked on verifying the site through Google. Which let me tell you was a bit of a pain in the butt. Because the stuff they wanted me to do I either couldn’t do, or didn’t know how to do. I tried downloading this Google plugin but it wasn’t showing up on my administrator page, so I couldn’t do anything with that. Worked and worked on it. Nothing. Went to bed Wednesday night with no answers whatsoever.
Continued this process yesterday. Started looking up ways to make that message go away. Long story shorter, I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere until last night when I noticed that the plugin for Google was finally showing up in the Jetpack app. I was finally able to link the site to Google and sent yet another plea for them to look things over. I told them that I had had WordPress look things over and they couldn’t find any issues. Then I headed off towards bed.
Along my way I just laid it out in God’s hands. In my heart, I knew that these obstacles were not from Him. I felt that in a world where both good and evil exist and evil is out to corrupt truth, this obstacle could only be a tool of that evil. In which case, the good (God) would triumph over this situation, if only I would trust Him. With both hands I grabbed onto that trust and accepted the peace that came along with it.
This morning when I got up and checked the site, there it was, just as it was supposed to be. Ready and waiting for the next step along this journey. Let’s do this.
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