How to prevent funny characters on Home Page

Question

Solved it thanks to [at]OnethingSimple and @milo.

It was the W3 Total Cache plugin. I removed it from my server and everything works fine.

Here’s the path I had to take.

Step 1 – went into my network admin on the site having the problem to confirm that W3TC was not activate or network active — and it was not.

Step 2 – walked through each of my other networks (over a dozen) to Network Deactivate the W3TC plugin — again it is one of the standard plugins I install on every new network.

Here’s was an interesting finding:
enter image description here

Each network site showed this error screen. But I proceeded to Network Deactivate the W3TC plugin anyway on each and every one of my networks.

Step 4 – After network deactivating the plugin, I proceeded to Delete it from the network admin panel on my primary site. When I did, I got this error on screen:

W3 Total Cache Error: some files appear to be missing or out of place. Please re-install plugin or remove /home/abcdefg/public_html/wp-content/advanced-cache.php.W3 Total Cache Error: some files appear to be missing or out of place. Please re-install plugin or remove /home/abcdefg/public_html/wp-content/db.php.W3 Total Cache Error: some files appear to be missing or out of place. Please re-install plugin or remove /home/abcdefg/public_html/wp-content/object-cache.php.

So I looked at the Drop-ins plugins as shown below:

enter image description here

Step 5 – next I FTP’d onto my server and deleted these 3 files:

./wp-content/advanced-cache.php ./wp-content/db.php ./wp-content/object-cache.php

Step 6 – I tried to delete these 2 directories via FTP and could not. So I telnet’d into server as root and deleted them:

./wp-content/cache ./wp-content/w3tc-config

Step 7 – I then removed this line of code from wp-config.php:

define('WP_CACHE', true); // Added by W3 Total Cache

Step 8 – I then removed these blocks of directives from .htaccess:

# 2015-02-05 updated as part of install of W3 Total Cache Plugin
# BEGIN W3TC Page Cache core
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} w3tc_preview [NC]
    RewriteRule .* - [E=W3TC_PREVIEW:_preview]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} =""
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \/$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !(comment_author|wp\-postpass|w3tc_logged_out|wordpress_logged_in|wptouch_switch_toggle) [NC]
    RewriteCond "%{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/_index%{ENV:W3TC_PREVIEW}.html" -f
    RewriteRule .* "/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/_index%{ENV:W3TC_PREVIEW}.html" [L]
</IfModule>
# END W3TC Page Cache core

# 2014-09-18 added as part of install of W3 Total Cache Plugin
# BEGIN W3TC Browser Cache
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
        Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
    </IfModule>
        AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/x-component application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript text/x-js text/html text/richtext image/svg+xml text/plain text/xsd text/xsl text/xml image/x-icon application/json
    <IfModule mod_mime.c>
        # DEFLATE by extension
        AddOutputFilter DEFLATE js css htm html xml
    </IfModule>
</IfModule>
# END W3TC Browser Cache

Step 9 – refreshed the home page on the site numerous, numerous times. NO MORE FUNNY CHARACTERS !!!

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