Artifacts in the code

[lesliekirk]

This may technically be Miva related but I figure that it's so obscure enough that it stumped the Support team. I stumbled across something today that I haven't run into in years and I was trying to doublecheck to make sure it was okay to remove all these tags I had found inserted into a Miva site I was reviewing. I don't know how they get there but I am pretty sure they don't get hard coded in. Every form tag in the site has an additional hidden tag:

<input type="hidden" name="phpMyAdmin" value="long string of numbers and letters" />

The "long string of numbers and letters" is exactly the same throughout the entire site. Removing the hidden tag doesn't seem to break anything. Why would it? If they were needed they would be in every Miva site.

I never did find out what caused it. One guess was it occurred when a Miva site was moved to a new host.

[Rick Wilson]

That was never stock Miva code.

[lesliekirk]

That was never stock Miva code.

LOL, yes, that much I knew. I'm just trying to figure out how it got inserted into a number of sites over the years. It may be as much as 10 years since I last saw this happen.

[Rick Wilson]

That I don't know

[Nerd Boy Inc]

It could have been used for Troubleshooting, updating something, or giving access to phpMyAdmin again for troubleshooting.

[GDesigns]

I recall seeing that and cleaning it up, but i swear it's been at least 12 years and I can't for the life of me remember the issue

[lesliekirk]

It could have been used for Troubleshooting, updating something, or giving access to phpMyAdmin again for troubleshooting.

I could understand it being used perhaps on one page, but this is in every form on every page in the site, including forms that don't even have a Miva function. I can confirm that this latest site was hosted with more than one host, I just don't know when they moved to their current host.

[lesliekirk]

I recall seeing that and cleaning it up, but i swear it's been at least 12 years and I can't for the life of me remember the issue

It has been quite a while since I've seen this too. This particular site is MMUI still has a lot of lingering MM5 to it. The nav bar still has the old Miva logo in it

[oliverands]

Could it have been installed by a third-party module?

[lesliekirk]

Could it have been installed by a third-party module?

That's an interesting thought, but I don't recall any module that did this. It would have had to have been a pre-2007 module.

[oliverands]

You could check on the server to see if there is a directory that's not a standard Miva one. If this were the case, there would probably be some other code, not Miva native, living on the server. You might be able to track it down that way.

[GDesigns]

I think, but I could be wrong, it had to do with the server setup back then. Also non-miva hosted site/s

[ids]

This may jog a memory...

Years ago prior to Ready Themes for sure, and possibly from the ancient times of the original 5.0 when Miva wasn't Miva managed, but by someone else, I took over a couple stores originally done by pro services (again, the early days of this). These sites had these codes everywhere. I don't think I remember the specifics of my experience with these, but I am fairly sure these sites weren't Miva Hosted (Miva Hosting was in infancy). By the time I got these stores, the tag appeared to be completely ineffective. I was able to remove them and the pages still worked.

Maybe the tag/code was needed to make a secure/valid connection with the MySQL Tables for some reason? Then, later updates of Merchant and server configurations eliminated the need?

Scott

[GDesigns]

Yup, I agree with Scott - it was for sure non-Miva hosted sites and I remember simply find/replace (as in delete) them and everything still worked fine.

[lesliekirk]

Yup, I agree with Scott - it was for sure non-Miva hosted sites and I remember simply find/replace (as in delete) them and everything still worked fine.

I've known that deleting all these "artifacts" never broke a site, as I had to do it for a number of sites. I was just really trying to see if anyone knew how they got there. I seem to recall it happening when I site was moved from one host to another. I don't think it was anything put there on purpose since I seem to recall it showing up after a site was moved to a new host (and just due to the sheer numbers of these I have had to remove in a single site).