I’ve been dealing with a strange and persistent bug in a Metabox + Elementor setup involving a cloneable group.
Here’s the issue:
Whenever I type specific trigger words into the title or sometimes the description of a card, the images in OTHER cards break. For example, if the card title contains the word “Trex”, several images in the layout fail to load and return 404 errors. Inspecting the broken images shows that Elementor/Metabox is outputting an incorrect filename, not the actual one assigned. (See https://imgur.com/O4LLDQW)
A few observations:
- Changing the title to a single letter (e.g., “a”) breaks all images in the group. (See https://imgur.com/ChV48Tu)
- Changing the title to something else like “Sample” or “Trexs” makes everything display correctly again. (See https://imgur.com/tkU2ILY)
- The trigger word isn’t consistent across sites, but on this specific one the trigger is “Trex.”
- The issue appears random—sometimes triggered by the title field, sometimes by the description field.
- The affected image fields themselves are not being modified; the break occurs only based on the text content of other fields.
- When an image breaks, the rendered image tag shows a different filename than the one actually uploaded.
This has been happening for a long time and across different implementations of similar Metabox + Elementor group structures.
Has anyone experienced something like this? Could this be some kind of sanitization conflict, filename collision, or unexpected string parsing issue inside Elementor or Metabox?
Any suggestions or debugging direction would be greatly appreciated.
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