Tek-Bull

How to fix TimThumb’ s 404 Problem on WordPress

Just recently we had a problem here on Tek-Bull where the thumbnail images were not displaying properly. In fact, the thumbnails were not showing up at all. We are still unsure as to what caused the problem but we sat around for nearly 20 hours trying to figure out what the problem was.

The Thumbnail images were working perfect in the morning, and less than 2 hours later, they started to fade away until there were fully gone. We knew the problem was in the Post-Thumbnail file since that’s the file that calls for the thumbnails. The only problem is that the file was created with three different other PHPs.

A plugin called “get the image”, the thumbnail post php file, and the TimThumb php file.

Just in case you are unfamiliar with TimThumb, that’s a file that takes the images from your posts and it re-sizes them to the correct size to be used as your thumbnails. After about 20 hours of experimenting with different sizes and scripts, we eventually found the problem.

There are actually Two Solutions:

1) IF you are using Hostgator as your hosting provider this problem is extremely easy to fix. Call them and tell them that your TimThumb Scrip is currently being blocked by a Mod_Security Rule. Tell them that you need to unblock the script and in 20 minutes or less, you’ll be good to go. For some reason or another, hostgator blocks this script from working properly.

2) IF you are not using Hostgator, then you probably have a problem with your actual script, find TimThumb under editor in wordpress. Click on Edit file, and find the following line. “CHMOD” and after wards you should have a couple of numbers. What you need to do is change your numbers to 755. Normally they are on 777 or 666. Every once in a while the script changes the cache file and you need to change the timthumb to a 755.

I hope this helped you out a bit.