The Pretty Links plugin is throwing so many PHP errors that it is causing the PHP error log file to balloon up to over a gigabyte (GB) in size.
That is triggering disk space overage warnings from your host.
See what actions to take now.
What’s Happening
In the last big 3.0 update the Pretty Links plugin began throwing PHP errors.
On most hosts, those errors are reported in a log file, either called:
- error_log (on most cPanel hosts)
- php_errorlog (on SiteGround hosting)
That file should never exceed 1MB.
But with these rapid fire errors, it is quickly filling up to over 1GB.
What to Do Now
See my livestream below for more details.
And be sure to Follow and turn on Notifications for the BlogAid Facebook page so you see these livestreams where I break the news.
Take these steps to fix all of it:
- Deactivate the plugin
- Ask your host to delete and then recreate the error log file so you can get out of disk overage hot water
- After the log file is cleared and you have disk space room again, quickly reactivate the plugin and update to version 3.0.6, which has a fix for this.
- If you have cPanel access, you can monitor the error log file to see if it is still getting errors thrown to it.
What to Do In the Future
If you are not using this plugin specifically for tracking your affiliate links, then consider switching to the Redirection plugin.
The reason why is that Pretty Links is chewing up your database with all of its tracking info on link clicks.
Redirection has logs like that too, but you can turn them off.
As stated in the livestream below, there is no way to export your redirects from the free version of Pretty Links. You’ll need to manually copy them and paste into Redirection.
Also, don’t use any redirect if you just need to make one of your own permalinks pretty/shorter. You can edit the slug directly to do that.
Livestream
This aired on July 24th and I’ll have updates to this post with any changes to the plugin.
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Hi MaAnna,
Paul from Pretty Links support team here.
Thanks for your detailed post. Version 3.0+ uses custom post types for the link management as the 2.x method was getting quite out-dated, inefficient and difficult to maintain.
After updating the plugin to 3.0.0+ a migration runs (if it hasn’t run already) to convert the 2.x links to 3.x custom post types.
In some cases the existing links had a “null” value in the updated column which caused the migration to get stuck in an infinite loop – blowing up the error logs as you outlined.
As soon as we caught this it was fixed the same day in version 3.0.1. However, the stuck PHP process could continue running in the background for some time (depending on server timeout limits) even after updating.
We feel absolutely terrible about this, and if there’s anyone still experiencing this issue please contact me (https://prettylinks.com/contact/) and I will help you get this taken care of personally.
Thanks!
Thanks for letting us know all the details Paul!!!!
I’m thinking that process was stuck running even after updating the plugin for a few folks, including the client I was working with at the time.
Main thing is, it was fixed quickly and folks know what to do to relieve the disk overage. And that fix is fast and free from the host.
It’s a good plugin for tracking affiliate links, and has been very stable for years. I hope this does not make folks lose faith in it and they keep using if they need it.
The plugin will definitely stay on my recommended list for affiliate tracking!!!
Thanks for letting us know the backstory, Paul! Now I don’t have to wonder what might happen with each new Pretty Links update notice. I don’t have a lot of links, but it does come in really handy for forwarding people to webinar registrations & other special promotions.