“Cheatin’ uh?”

Okay, where do I begin. I have to confess, this is not what you think. It is not a response to that special someone who was found cheating but more or less a complaint I received from clients about an error message in the latest WordPress version 3.4.1.

First I was deeply embarrassed and confused about receiving this complaint.

It’s part of my everyday work life to solve problems and mysteries. So here is what I had to do to get to the bottom of this particular one. I uploaded an image to WordPress using the uploader and all of a sudden I was presented with an error message. Now I really can’t call this an error message since it seems more like a joke to me. A popup appeared and there it was, “Cheatin`, uh?”. I had to double check to make sure that this was not some type of prank, but apparently not, this is what passes for an error message in the crazy world of open source WordPress development.
It is very strange as I would expect something like this from a plugin written by a noob who feels he needs to share what’s on his mind at the time. This message “Cheatin`, uh?” is actually a part of the WordPress core system. And it seems to occur when WordPress has been updated to 3.4.

So what am I supposed to say to many of our clients about this message? after all it is not a professional approach to an error message.

In any case how do i fix this? Below are some points that could help you deal with the situation:
1) You can go the long way round and add images to the media folder via ftp and then use the url of the image where you have to add the url field for the image
2) Check your theme, it may need to be updated to latest version
3) Update your theme manually as seen in the following article: http://www.wpthemehelp.com/knowledgebase/cheatin-uh-wordpress-3-4-bug-fix/

Other sources on the WordPress.org forum:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/cheatin-uh
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/cheatin-uh-error-on-anyone-who-is-not-an-editor-or-administrator

To conclude, perhaps it is a good idea for WordPress developers to modify their error messages. Also it might help to know why the error has occurred rather than simply saying something redundant like “Cheatin`, uh?”