Yop Poll – do not upgrade to 5.0!

https://xpil.eu/pYdnG 📋

If you are reading this post, chances are you are either one of my three returning visitors (although there is a possibility that some - or even all - of those three, died of boredom) or you recently tried to update the Yop Poll WordPress plugin from version 4.9.1 to 5.0, you lost all your wonderful polls and now you are frantically trying to Google for a solution and after getting through many, many Google result pages you finally got here.

Do I have any good news for you?

Well, try to guess. As you can see, I am aware of the issue. And polls on my site are working perfectly:

[yop_poll id="39"]

So, yes, I have tried to upgrade, I lost all my polls, I went through anger, frustration and resignation. I contacted their development team. I even tried to sacrifice a goat but my lady said she wouldn't be too happy with a dead goat at home plus I just ran out of altars so the situation got really dramatic.

Finally, I reached out for a brain. I found one, kind of an old one, in need of some oiling and refurbishing, but it was there, just between my ears. And I asked myself a question: what would an average person do if they lost something as valuable as a set of useless, boring, stupid polls?

The answer wasn't very helpful, either. But then a second thought jumped in: BACKUPS!

So, dear human being trying to find a solution and revive your missing polls: do you have any backups of your blog?

Because if you don't then, well, you are screwed. And polless. Period. You should stop reading this right now and go some place quiet, and start swearing. Or screaming. Pulling hair should do, too.

If you do, however, belong to that one percent of bloggers that care about taking backups of their blogs, then happy days! You may start preparing red carpets, rose petals and call for angelic choirs as you will have your polls back in a very short time.

So, what should you do?

First, do not panic. Grab your gzipped database backup and open it in any text viewer. I used Total Commander's built-in viewer, but it does not really matter as long as it can search for text and copy stuff to your clipboard.

Then you should log in to your MySQL back-end...

Did I lose you here? Unfortunately, I am unable to provide you with a detailed MySQL training course so if you don't know how to log in to your MySQL back-end then you need to find someone who can do it for you. A grandson will usually be sufficient, although you may need to ring that bearded neighbor with greasy hair and worn pullover. Anyway, what was it...

Ah, MySQL back-end, right. So, I am assuming that you have your MySQL back-end open (via phpMyAdmin) plus you see your daily MySQL dump unzipped and opened in a text viewer.

The next step is to locate the block of SQL with your yop_poll tables, within that backup. In order to find it, you will need to trigger a search dialog, then key-in "wp_yop_poll_answermeta" (without double quotes) and hit the Search button.

Once you locate the line containing wp_yop_poll_answermeta, you need to select everything starting from that line up to the line that says "# End of data contents of table `wp_yop_polls`".

Once again: you want to select all lines from the one with wp_yop_poll_answermeta to the one with End of data contentes of table `wp_yop_polls`.

You need to copy those lines and...

Oh, no, hang on. Keep it selected and open your WP Administrative interface, and remove the Yop Poll plugin first. It will get rid of all the related tables (empty anyway, as you just upgraded).

Now, come back to your carefully selected set of lines and copy them to clipboard.

Now switch to db back-end, open the "Exec SQL" dialog and paste your clipboard contents in there.

Then a quick prayer to whatever invisible thingies you use to pray to when things look bad...

And finally, execute the SQL you just pasted.

As a result, you should see all the WP_YOP_POLL_% tables back in the MySQL interface.

Finally, you need to grab a copy of the 4.9.1. version of the plugin (try here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/yop-poll/developers/) and install it via WP admin menu. Once you activate the plugin, you may start singing Hosanna or dancing naked in the woods or whaterver else you usually do when you are happy.

The very last step (and it is obligatory, no excuses!) is to leave a thankful comment here just below this post. If you skip this step, the Yop Poll on your site will automatically upgrade to 5.0, deleting all the polls again.

Now, good night.

https://xpil.eu/pYdnG 📋