I don’t know if you noticed yesterday, but my site was down. Like all day. I was having some serious issues. Someone at some time found an old, unused directory of mine and somehow put some code in that bad boy– which generated over 800 pages of bullshit spam.

Here’s what happened:

I went into Google Webmasters¹ and was checking out my links. I’d seen a site that offered to tell me how much I’d get if I sold this site and, well, those are always fun. Then that prompted me to check back into my Webmasters panel for the first time in a long time. Anyway, I’m looking over the stats and see some crazy fucking keywords. Google thinks I talk about banks and loans and mortgages? What the fuck? So then I look around the panel. I found a shitload of internal links going to an old directory². I go into the directory and delete the file that I thought was the issue. You know, the only file in the directory.

Don’t you know that file regenerated? ARGH! So, I go in and change the code in it, then change the name of the parent directory³. I go back in to see if the piece of shit re-regenerated and fuck me. All those files that were previously hidden from view were right there. Oh my god, there were so many of them. Select all-> delete. Then I waited and all was still gone. But wait! What if there was hidden code in another file? That’s a lot of flippin’ files.

Damn it!

I go into my phpAdmin and export my data. Except I didn’t want to export some plugin data so I uncheck it. Apparently, I also unchecked the comments, but not the comment meta data. *ahem* Oops. Anyway, I dump the database. All gone. Buh-bye, Fab Jinxed, and any bad files hidden therein. Zapped it all. As you can see, I did have backup files of the important stuff⁴. I didn’t save any plugins or any of the old themes, though. I happily deleted all that shit. The entire time I was wishing burning, dripping gonorrhea in that spammer’s eye.

So, I get a new install of WP and put that bad boy up. Then I go to import all the data. Damn me, I exported it in .sql format. Much hair pulling and wailing did commence. I kept getting freaking errors. Dur. Of course, they did. Because I was trying to create tables that were already there. But I wasn’t really sure what I should delete or leave or whatever. And then would WP recreate them or would that fuck up the install too? I tried a bunch of different things and then about gave up. By this time I had to get ready to go for a meeting with my new boss⁵ so I had to put it aside for a while. Came home in a fantabulous mood and then it hit me. The solution!

How to Import WordPress When You Messed Up and Exported a .sql file

I don’t know if this was the easiest solution, but it just popped in my head and when solutions do that– to me — that means I need to hurry up and solve that damned problem.

I created another database, imported all the tables, then one by one I moved the tables over. I deleted the tables I needed to replace in my WP database, then when into my “I so messed up” database and over they went. For those that might want an better solution than that: check a single table (wp-posts, for instance), then go into the “Operations” tab. Click “copy” data (or whatever it’s called– I can’t remember), make sure you pick “from [the current database] to [the WP one]“. Hit the go button and you’re all set! Do that for each table. Again I’m sure there’s a much easier way to do that, but this is what I managed to figure out.

There’s no help for the comments, though. They’re all gone now. Into the nether. Awww… Don’t worry, you can see how many people have commented on each post because I didn’t forget the comment meta data.

Oh! You know what else I didn’t copy over? My post and sidebar image files. Yup, just deleted them willy-nilly. Luckily for me I had a really old backup– Google cache. Hallelujah! *Doin’ a happy dance…shakin’ my butt.* Everything’s ready to go.

So, now I’m in the process of having Google take all of those files out of their index. And I reported the motherfucker that was getting paid off those links. Piece of shit had all those pages linking to each other and then had each one linking to his site– which was set up like the ones that Matt Cutts hates so bad. A bunch of crap thrown together– literally, none of it made any damned sense– and surrounded it with Google Ads. I reported it for two reasons: 1) Fuck that asshole little pubic louse and 2.) I wasn’t the only one who had hidden sites pointing to him. I checked. I’m going to be writing emails tomorrow, I think. Or not. Google will probably email them or something. Why should they believe me?

I don’t know how these buttholes got in, but I have a really good idea. And I’ll be keeping a better eye on that. I can’t believe I missed 800+ pages. What the fuck? I don’t know how long they were there, but now they’re far away.

Anyway, then I decided to play some more with MySQL. I have a local install on an external hard drive, thank you so much Xampp. I was inserting tables, editing data and trying to decipher the manual⁶. I get all excited when I do something that is pretty basic, but which I was too afraid to do before. So, yeah, technically I was working on a site today– it just wasn’t my theme. I did fix the pagination on the index page. That’s something, right?

1. Remember, I’m a stat whore.
2. I should’ve deleted that a long time ago, but for some reason I didn’t do it. I deleted the database connected to it and every other damned directory. Just not that one.
3. These things are often tied into the file via the directory name.
4. The theme files
5. Information will be provided in a private post.
6. That shit’s hilarious, you know, because my brain was fighting me the whole way. I’m pretty sure I didn’t remember anything.