PBJ SEO & Security 4.7.1 — the cache-buster fix
Hide-the-version was stripping every plugin’s asset cache-buster on WordPress 7.1, so browsers kept serving pre-update files. Fixed.
PBJ SEO & Security 4.7.1 is out. One fix, and it is worth explaining because the symptom looked like something else entirely.
What was wrong
The security tab has a switch called Hide the WordPress version. Part of what it does is strip the ?ver= stamp WordPress appends to stylesheets and scripts, because that stamp gives away which version of WordPress a site is running.
It was matching that stamp as a piece of text rather than reading it properly. On WordPress 7.1, an asset stamped ver=7.12.1788… contains ver=7.1, so the whole stamp was stripped — not just WordPress’s own, but every plugin’s and every theme’s. Those stamps are what tell a browser a file has changed. Without them, visitors kept the previous release’s CSS and JavaScript, which reads as an update that silently failed to install.
What changed
The version parameter is now parsed out of the query string and removed only when it is exactly the WordPress version. Every other plugin’s cache-buster survives, and the setting still hides the WordPress version everywhere it did before. Nothing else in the release changed — no settings, no schema, no firewall behaviour.
Upgrading
Sites with a licence key will be offered 4.7.1 in the usual place. If you had turned that switch on and noticed stale styling after updating a plugin, a hard refresh once after this update is all it needs.