Empty Article Trash Erases Assets Table

[moodog4rg]

When Did Problem Start: Yesterday at 2 pm Central Time (approximately)
Version Of Joomla Used On Site In Question: 3.7.3
What Changes Were Made Yesterday:

1). Updated Admin Tools from 4.3.1 to 5.0.1 This was done under Extensions - Update
2). Uninstalled Admin Tools 5.0.1

Steps to reproduce problem:

a). Articles - Add New Article
b). Status: Published - Category: Local News (For Example) - Title: test001aaa - Description: This Is A Test (Save)
c). Unpublish article (So far so good)
d). Trash article (Again, so far so good)
e). Filter articles using status - Trashed
f). Select article test001aaa
g). Click Empty Trash
h). I am now kicked back to the login screen
i). I login to CPanel (phpMyAdmin) and to my surprise, the jos_assets table is gone. Once I restore jos_assets users are able to login and post new articles.

FYI If I repeat steps c through g with an article posted by a different user I do not get kicked out. The process completes properly and the jos_assets table remains intact.

Since the problem began I reinstalled Admin Tools (version 4.3.1) and attempted to run it to see if it would fix any user permissions issues. Sadly, that has not resolved this.

Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.

[gws]

The latest admin tools is for J 3.8.5 which is the latest version of joomla,possibly why you had trouble? have you considered up dating to 3.8.5 and seeing what happens then?

[sozzled]

"jos_assets" table? Hmmm ... any J! 3.x that uses a database table (or tables) with a "jos" prefix rings alarm bells. Sounds like this website started out as a J! 1.5 website that may have been migrated to J! 3.7.3 (J! 3.7.3, itself, was released 7 months ago and that means it's outdated and already known to be vulnerable) and the table prefix was never changed.

Unusual for a J! 3.x website (or a properly migrated J! 1.5→3.x site) to behave like this; I've never seen any reports of this happening before.

Best bet is to start by providing us with better information about the current state of this website and, to do that, use the Forum Post Assistant tool referred to in the pink section near the top of this page.

[moodog4rg]

FYI I have another website running the following:

Joomla 3.7.2
Admin Tools Package 5.0.0

I encounter absolutely no issues whatsoever with creation or deletion of articles and no login issues and assets table remains intact. I am making a clone of the affected website on a dev environment and will consider your suggestion of using latest Joomla version there and latest Admin Tools. I just find it a head scratcher that the assets table would go missing.

I double checked the /libraries folder in the site with the issue and the site not having the issue and found that the /f0f subdirectory was missing on the affected website whereas the site not having the issue had that subfolder intact. This makes me think that in the attempt to upgrade Admin Tools the process did not properly complete and that folder got erased in the process. Am I onto something?

[sozzled]

You're asking us to guess how something (that seems to affect one of the millions of J! websites that exist) might be doing this. I don't know the cause and I certainly don't know the solution.

FYI, the /fof subdirectory should exist irrespective of whether you have any Akeeba products installed.

Sorry.