A stray, out-of-place fragment of text was appearing on a live page with no visible source in the page’s main markup. Each plausible injection point was checked and cleared in order: a previously-used code-snippet plugin (initially reported as fully removed), a cookie-consent plugin’s own gated tracking services checked field by field, the theme’s own custom-script area, a chatbot widget’s front-end files, and finally its backend endpoint file.
When You Have to Rule Out Candidates One at a Time to Find an Injection Point
Field Note #294
⚡ Quick Fix (TL;DR)
The Culprit: An early assumption — "the snippet plugin was removed, so it can't be the source of anything" — turned out to be only partly true; one snippet was still active in the "removed" plugin the whole time. Re-checking it directly, rather than trusting the earlier claim, is what kept the search from permanently ruling out the real location.
The Fix: The candidate list was worked through exhaustively, with each candidate's current state directly verified rather than assumed from something said earlier in the conversation. The verification step also surfaced an unrelated, more urgent risk worth flagging on its own.
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