***UPDATE: Thank you to the Internet and @cayloe for pointing me to this post, which explains the song “this is what you want, this is what you get” playing on your site. After 10 years as a loyal Sitemeter subscriber, I have removed their code from my website.***
After a frustrating few hours under the hood of my website yesterday, I am ready to throw in the towel. But maybe there is someone out there who can help me.
A few months ago, I noticed that occasionally, when I loaded my Wordpress site, it would play a song. The song goes something like “This is what you want, this is what you get…” The song doesn’t play all the time — it seems to be the first time I load my site each day — so I thought maybe it was an ad or something. Well, three months later and it is still happening. I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is, so I suspect it is malware. Here is what I’ve done during my investigations:
- Updated Wordpress to the most recent version. Performed a full backup of everything just in case.
- Updated all active plugins to latest version.
- Deactivated any plugins I don’t use.
- Run a free malware scan on Scuri. (Negative.)
- Paid money for SiteLock and had them run a more comprehensive scan. That turned up three outbound links to sites with spam to I removed those. The next scan turned up perfectly clean.
- Wrote a post on the Wordpress forums and asked for help. (The three responders suspect an ad.)
- Researched whether Google ads ever play anything with sound. They don’t, according to my research.
- Searched my home page code for any mentions of .avi, .wav, .mp3, .m4a. Negative.
I really want to get rid of this annoying song so I need some help. I should note the song has changed a bit since I originally discovered it. It used to do the lyrics followed by broken glass. The broken glass sound seems to have disappeared.
If you are good with code and can help me get to the bottom of this, I will treat you to Sunday lunch at Hix Smithfield. (Roughly £60 value, plus the invaluableness of my scintillating company.) And if you are good with Wordpress and code, there could be some smaller projects in it for you.
Please help!
***UPDATE: Thank you to the Internet and @cayloe for pointing me to this post, which explains the song “this is what you want, this is what you get” playing on your site. After 10 years as a loyal Sitemeter subscriber, I have removed their code from my website.***
6 comments
I got a sound ad on this page on loading. I’ve previously had issues with malware in my theme code- how about stripping that out and seeing if it fixes it? You don’t mention having done that?
Thanks!! Sadly I don’t know how to strip out my theme code? Afraid to touch that!
It’s pretty straight forward – are you on your own hosting? You should be able to follow this – download a new theme and just activate it as a test. Will at least give a hint if it is that? Instructions here; http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/install_themes.htm
What I did previously is avutally go into the ftp and strip out ALL by non-standard themes, then downloaded new ones entirely, just in case
Try ditching the SiteMeter.
OMG, THANK YOU!!! Lifesaver!! I was really pulling my hair out over this one. And I just spent god knows how much money on Sitelock to try to fix it!
Glad you got this fixed (and feel free to drop me a line any time you have wordpress/php problems…. lord knows I’ve had to debug enough of them in my time…)
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