I have inherited maintenance responsibilities for a Wordpress site supporting a small sailing Club. Unfortunately this maintenance task is being rendered rather painful as a consequence of receiving a constant barrage of 404 Alert warning email notifications.
Reviewing the entire site as best I might I’ve not been able to locate the source that is generating these alerts. However, while researching the topic online I’ve ended up focussing on references to the ‘MainWP’ Wordpress add-on ‘Maintenance’ extension as being a possible initiator of this feature. But the site did not have or no longer had, the ‘Main’MainWP’ add-on installed. So, as a trial to attempt to see if this add-on may have been in use previously, and had been used to enable the 404 Alert function, which had then been subsequently add-on uninstalled without disabling the 404 Alert, I had a go at installing it.
In so doing I’ve then come against the problem highlighted in a number of support topics on this site that mention the “404 monitoring feature has been removed for new users”.
Could anyone possibly assist me to clarify if the 404 Alert emails are being generated from legacy ‘MainWP’ add-on code inserted in our site? And if it is the source, please guide me as to how I might disable or remove this function.
404 Email alerts were indeed once part of the functionality of our Maintenance extension.
If you are still receiving these emails, that means that a MainWP Dashboard where the old version of the Maintenance extension (older than v4.1) is still installed.
The WordPress site for which you inherited responsibilities is also added as a Child Site to this MainWP Dashboard.
404 Email Alerts can be disabled, or the Maintenance extension can just be updated to the latest version.
Do you have control of this MainWP Dashboard or know who does?
With respect to your query as to whether I have access to the ‘MainWP’ dashboard, I did when I re-installed it on the site. But it is worth noting that insofar as I have been able to ascertain the ‘MainWP’ add-on was not present until I executed its installation and activation. However, the 404 Alert message were coming through prior to that.
In that case am I pursuing the wrong path here in presuming the ‘MainWP’ add-on is in fact the source of these messages. Please note I have again uninstalled the add-on and the 404 Alerts are still being generated. Would that not mean the source of the Alerts is coming from elsewhere?
If so could you suggest how I might track down the real source of these Alerts?