You see them all the time when a page gets dugg on digg.com or suddenly becomes very popular -

Can’t select database

We were able to connect to the database server (which means your username and password is okay) but not able to select the xxxx database.

* Are you sure it exists?
* On some systems the name of your database is prefixed with your username, so it would be like username_wordpress. Could that be the problem?

If you don’t know how to setup a database you should contact your host. If all else fails you may find help at the WordPress Support Forums.

Well recently I needed to make sure that if oen of my wordpress installs couldn’t connect or whatever that it showed a different page (well, different text). So if you want to do the same (at your own risk), open up wp-includes/wp-db.php and edit:

• line 46 (connecting to server)
• line 66 (selecting the database)
• you may also want to edit the html from around line 312

Hope that helped you. Now digg me (just kidding – who wants this at the top of digg!) to prove that it works (although – of course my host will cope with it ;). They have before)

Some ideas to put on your messages:

• Tell them that something is wrong!
• Put a link to a Google cache (in the form of http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.example.com/)
• Try the coralize site – in the form of http://www.example.com.nyud.net:8080/
• Put a retry button/link