2017-09-14
Categories: WordPress
*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***

I’ve used WordPress for almost 10 years, and recently experienced an issue I have never seen before. Auto Draft posts kept appearing in my list of posts. They were in draft status so didn’t show up on my blog from the front end, but the most frustrating part was that they couldn’t be deleted from within the WordPress Admin area.

No way to delete them!

It was driving me up the wall. I could have as many as 5 or 6 showing up. The only way I could delete them was by logging in to PHPMyAdmin, then doing a simple SQL query to find any posts where the post_title was Auto Draft. Then, selecting all posts and deleting them from the database.

I started looking at the plugins I had installed. Each day I deactivated one, or removed it when it wasn’t necessary for my site. Each day I would check back and sure enough, another pesky Auto Draft post had appeared. I found a post here that had one sentence right near the bottom of the forum that stated: You should disable the Quick press widget on the admin page, because that creates a new auto-draft whenever you load it.

Stop the Auto Draft Posts

I didn’t have Quick press widget showing, BUT it did point me in the right direction to check the admin page. I figured out that the new Auto Draft posts were created every single time I went to the WordPress Dashboard. So, searching some more, I found this post from the awesome WP Beginner blog that showed how you could disable Dashboard widgets. Using the code they provided, I added it to the functions.php file. Bingo…. the posts stopped being created! Phew!

I edited the original code to only disable the quick press widget:

function remove_dashboard_widgets() {
    global $wp_meta_boxes;
    unset($wp_meta_boxes[‘dashboard’][‘side’][‘core’][‘dashboard_quick_press’]);
}
add_action(‘wp_dashboard_setup’, ‘remove_dashboard_widgets’ );

So, sanity restored! Hopefully this helps someone else who might be in the same boat. Wish I knew why it started in the first place, but some things you just need to move on from. Back to activating my plugins again!

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6 thoughts on “Auto Draft Posts Getting Created Automatically”

  2. Any idea why this happens? It went on for me for a long time before finding this solution. None of my other sites have experienced this.

    1. Hi Bill, no, never found out for sure, just that it seemed to be related to the Quick Press widget. I’ve never seen it again, nor have I seen it in any other sites either. It was strange and annoying! Glad it helped you.

  3. Luckily I never had such issue. However, I want to drop few lines on this regard which some of you may find useful.

    In general visiting “Dashboard” does not create “Auto Draft” posts. Auto Draft post gets created from “Posts/Page” section, specially when someone clicks on “Add New” button. It uses default WordPress “Autosave” feature of the “Revisions” system (https://wordpress.org/support/article/revisions/#autosaves).

    One way to resolve this issue is to disable the revisions system and prolonging the Autosave interval time (generally it’s 60 seconds). All you need to do is to add the following section on your “wp-config.php” (right before the comment where it says “That’s all, stop editing! …”. Add the following lines. This file is located at the root directory of the WordPress installation.

    CODE REMOVED BY ADMIN

    You can change the 3600 (60 sec x 60 min = 1 hour) to your desired number. For an example you can make it 86400 (60 sec x 14440 [60×24]), if you want to prolong the autosave period to be 24 hour.

    Hope that helps. Thank you.

    1. Hi Iftekhar, thanks for the comment! This was such an old post, I’d forgotten I had written it! No idea if it still happens. I’ve removed the code from your comment… it looked a bit spammy (hoping it’s actually not a spam post) so deleted that part just in case. Sorry!

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