[Robin W]

ok, I am not a bbpress author, just someone who tries to help out.

So it’s Sunday morning here in the UK, and I have guests coming for lunch, so I will try and pick this up later.

But let’s just eliminate some stuff.

1.

dashboard>settings>permalinks and just click save – this resets the permalinks and may help

2.

it could be a theme or plugin issue

Themes

As a test switch to a default theme such as twentytwenty, and see if this fixes.

Plugins

If that doesn’t work, also deactivate all plugins apart from bbpress and see if this fixes. if it does, re-enable one at a time to see which is causing the error.

If you cannot do this to your site (say because it is live) then use the ‘troubleshooting’ features of this plugin to let you test without affecting other users

Health Check & Troubleshooting

Then come back

[Robin W]

Registered members on the Forum can still see the “Contact” Link below people’s Avatars and I have just tested using a identity I use for testing and have successfully sent a PM to myself as Administrator – this instantly showed “You have 1 message unread” on my Administrator identity and clicking on the link has taken me to the message and all previous messages, just as it always has.

That is not from the private groups plugin That plugin has nothing to do with messaging.

If you care to list the ‘forum type’ plugins you are using, then I might be able to say which is doing this.

[finallyfoundausernamenotusedbefore]

Thanks once again for your quick response.

Yes, am happy with most of what you say but somehow the “bbP private groups” plugin does seem to be in some form of limbo. It currently shows “bbP private groups” as disabled on the Plugins page but it is definitely still active. Registered members on the Forum can still see the “Contact” Link below people’s Avatars and I have just tested using a identity I use for testing and have successfully sent a PM to myself as Administrator – this instantly showed “You have 1 message unread” on my Administrator identity and clicking on the link has taken me to the message and all previous messages, just as it always has. So everything seems to still be there despite the pligin showing itaself as disabled (i.e. it shows links for Activate and Delete).

I need to find a way to properly disable/remove this plugin – one option open to me is to delete the plugin but I fear doing that could make things worse.

Any suggestions welcome.

John

[Robin W]

ok, if the private groups plugin is not showing as active in

dashboaard>plugins

then it is not active.

Deactivating/reactivating a plugin may have fixed an issue

The 3 you have left are because these plugins need the authors to fix the issue, or if you are not at latest versions, you to update them.

Simple lightbox
welcome email editor
constructions

These errors will not cause your site to fail but will do in some later version of WordPress : WordPress will eventually chnage these form a ‘Notice’ error to a ‘Critial’ error, but that may be years away (or next week!)

If everything else is working, then I’d suggest you just switch off the error display, and enjoy your site

[Robin W]

1. yes, this is the intended behavior
2. yes, that behavior is set by a function which is called by an action, so we can remove it, and do something else.

so untested, but this should work

remove_action( 'bbp_template_redirect', 'bbp_forum_enforce_blocked', 1  );

add_action( 'bbp_template_redirect', 'rew_forum_enforce_blocked', 1  );

function rew_forum_enforce_blocked() {

	// Bail if not logged in or keymaster
	if ( ! is_user_logged_in() || bbp_is_user_keymaster() ) {
		return;
	}

	// Set 404 if in bbPress and user cannot spectate
	if ( is_bbpress() && ! current_user_can( 'spectate' ) ) {
		//DON'T DO THE SET 404 ie this is the code that the default bbp_forum_enforce_blocked does
		//bbp_set_404();
		// DO SOMETHING ELSE HERE!
	}
}

What the something else is, you will need to decide

Put this in your child theme’s function file –

ie wp-content/themes/%your-theme-name%/functions.php

where %your-theme-name% is the name of your theme

or use

Code Snippets

3. I can’t say what the original authors intentions were, but I suspect yes

[Robin W]

by the way, I tried your long post on my test site, and it worked ok.

[hollandnumerics]

I have caused an updated topic to fail when saving. The “test” topics all state that a critical error has occurred, but no emails are detected.

Now you are a blog member, please feel free to post a new topic

[hollandnumerics]

Check Email installed. It defaults to local sendmail, instead of installed Postman SMTP that uses smtp.officce365.com. However:

This test email proves that your WordPress installation at https://hollandnumerics.org.uk can send emails. Sent: Sun, 06 Jul 2025 10:10:50 +0000

[Robin W]

email does not have to match, but lots of things in between the send and recieve can jink emails they consider spam or suspicious.

So if you are not getting the error emails, can I suggest you install

Check & Log Email – Easy Email Testing & Mail logging

and use this to test emails, and if the site attempts to send an email, the email logs can tell you what it tried to send.

[hollandnumerics]

However, in Troubleshooting Mode, updated topic “test 3” is being shown correctly.

Active plugins: bbPress and bbp style pack

[hollandnumerics]

About Holland Numerics: Blog and Forums. › Forums › SAS Skills Discussion Forum (non-programming) › test 3

| Subscribe Favourite
There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.

[hollandnumerics]

FYI in issue #1 the post, when viewed, is empty whether the body contains table tags or not:

test 1:

hello

test 2:

hello

This is in Troubleshooting Mode with only bbpress and bbp style pack active.

[Robin W]

Does this occur anytime you try and access the forum page?

if so, it could be a theme or plugin issue

Themes

As a test switch to a default theme such as twentytwenty, and see if this fixes.

Plugins

If that doesn’t work, also deactivate all plugins apart from bbpress and see if this fixes. if it does, re-enable one at a time to see which is causing the error.

If you cannot do this to your site (say because it is live) then use the ‘troubleshooting’ features of this plugin to let you test without affecting other users

Health Check & Troubleshooting

Then come back

[Robin W]

ok, I’m a bit lost as to what your testing is showing.

The essence of fault finding is taking a setup that works and finding the difference between that and one that doesn’t work.

so I have a test site working with bbpress and style pack and nothing else. If your site with that same setup doesn’t work, then we can find the difference.

If it does work, then yes adding back plugins until it fails is a good strategy, but until we are both seeing the same, then it is not doing much good?

[Robin W]

ok, so this on my test site with just bbpress and style pack, using admin and keymaster roles publishes fine

<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
hello
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

do you still get a critical error with this combination, and if so I still need the exact error it produces

[Robin W]

thanks, and for your testing, what combination are you using?

I’m not asking you to try others levels, just getting your tests and my tests to be the same !

[hollandnumerics]

• I have tried Troubleshooting mode, with no active plugins.
• Activated bbPress, then bbp style pack.
• Topic “test 1” now displays, but body shows “This topic is empty”, even though the HTML tags are seen when the topic is edited.

Do I need to activate more plugins?

I have the following bbp-related plugins installed:

bbp-valoration
Version 0.1.1 by Eric Zeidan | Auto-updates enabled

bbPNNS Private Groups Bridge
Version 1.5.1.1 by Vinny Alves (UseStrict Consulting) | Auto-updates disabled

bbP private groups
Version 3.9.7 by Robin Wilson | Auto-updates enabled

bbPress
Version 2.6.14 by The bbPress Contributors | Auto-updates disabled

bbPress Move Topics
Version 1.1.6 by Pascal Casier | Auto-updates enabled

bbPress Notify (No-Spam)
Version 2.19.3 by Vinny Alves (UseStrict Consulting) | Auto-updates disabled

bbpress Simple View Counts
Version 0.2 by jezza101 | Auto-updates enabled

bbPress Votes
Version 1.2.5 by G.Breant | Auto-updates enabled

bbp style pack
Version 6.3.9 by Robin Wilson | Auto-updates disabled

bbp User Ranking
Version 3.7 by Robin Wilson | Auto-updates enabled

[hollandnumerics]

FYI I also created a topic “test 2”, that includes “hello”, but no table tags:

topic: test 2

The response is the same as with topic “test 1”.

[hollandnumerics]

Hi @robin-w,

This topic saved, but viewing it showed the following page:

About Holland Numerics: Blog and Forums. › Forums › test 1

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There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.

topic: test 1

[Robin W]

ok, so in the backend if I create a topic with a title of ‘test’ and this content

<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
hello
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Then it publishes all fine.

Does that work for you, and if so, can you give me exact steps to recreate problem.

Also able to edit that topic so changed hello to goodbye and it updated fine

[hollandnumerics]

WP: 6.8.1 (latest).
bbPress: 2.6.13 (latest).
bbPress Move Topics 1.1.6 (latest).
bbp style pack: 6.3.9 (latest).
themes: Twenty Fifteen and Twenty Twenty-five.
site: https://hollandnumerics.org.uk

Forum topic contains <TABLE>, <TBODY>, <TR> and <TD> HTML tags.

1. Able to edit title, body, tags in Forum Topic.
2. Clicking [Update] starts update.
3. Edit viewer disappears and Post list appears.
4. Forum Topic is unchanged.
5. No error messages.

Have also tried moving Topic to Page, but this fails to change type.
Creating new Forum Topic with copy of body text also does not complete.

[Robin W]

sorry read you first post too fast !

I did the fix for hello elementor some while ago, and things may have changed.

ok, on my test site the forums display whether style pack is enables or not, and indeed whether the option is ticked in theme support, and it may be my fix as such is no longer doing anything.

So without style pack, what is broken in either the forums, or your posts?

[Ricsca2]

I’m cleaning up an old abandoned forum…
It has over 60,000 members but few are real users and have written posts.
Is there a way to delete all users who have not written posts?
Chatgpt wrote me this script and it seems to have worked but if anyone has another safer and tested method I prefer it.
Thanks

DELETE u, um
FROM wp_users u
LEFT JOIN wp_usermeta um ON u.ID = um.user_id
LEFT JOIN wp_posts p ON u.ID = p.post_author AND p.post_type IN ('topic', 'reply')
WHERE p.ID IS NULL;

[Robin W]

reply threading means that you can reply to a reply and it will show against that reply, it lets a thread go in many directions – personally I hate it and would not use it.

‘Voices’ means the number of different people who have contributed to a thread.

As to your original question, I cannot replicate the issue, so I can only suggest you try the standard fault finding viz:

it could be a theme or plugin issue

Themes

As a test switch to a default theme such as twentytwenty, and see if this fixes.

Plugins

If that doesn’t work, also deactivate all plugins apart from bbpress and see if this fixes. if it does, re-enable one at a time to see which is causing the error.

If you cannot do this to your site (say because it is live) then use the ‘troubleshooting’ features of this plugin to let you test without affecting other users

Health Check & Troubleshooting

Then come back

[Robin W]

upgrade to the latest version of bbp style pack

dashboard>updates and select bbp style pack and update

then go to

dashboard>settings>bbp style pack>Custom CSS

and add this

.bsp-mark-all {
display : none ; 
}