The info below was submitted to Elementor tech support. They are stumped after several days and iterations and asked me to inquire here if someone had seen something similar and might give us a clue as to what is happening.
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Using bbpress, I have subforums, as defined by the parent child relationship. Now it seems that bbpress is refusing to assign ANY parents to any forum. If I take a child forum (any forum) and try to assign it to a new parent, when I update it it ends up with no parent. Every single time.

Oddly (LOL), I do have two older test sites where it is working okay. I am stumped about what is different.

I did about an hour of trying to track this down. My final step was to disable every plugin except for buddypress and bbpress. That caused it to start working properly again. I next added Elementor 2.0.4 and that immediately recreated the problem

I downgraded back to Elementor 1.9.8 and the problem persists. I also tried 1.9.6

Buddypress 2.9.4
bbpress 2.5.14
wordpress 4.9.5
elementor (various, 1.9.6, 1.9.8, 2.0.4)

I have a site where the parent function is working properly. It is running all the same versions of plugins listed above. The theme in both cases is identical (Astra 1.2.5). The plugins shown are the ONLY plugins activated on the broken site.

I have left my development site with everything disabled for now, but I need to get back to work within a day on this site.

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I have a test site available with the minimal configuration of plugins.

Dispensary Patients

I can share the admin login if needed with someone from the bbpress team if they wish to do some deep digging. You can see the site as a user at

[@robin-w Moderator 6 years, 8 months ago]

so in summary

live site with

Buddypress 2.9.4
bbpress 2.5.14
wordpress 4.9.5
elementor (various, 1.9.6, 1.9.8, 2.0.4)

WAS working, but then suddenly stopped. Yes, this was working and then wasn’t as opposed to not working ever on live?

Test Site :

Buddypress 2.9.4
bbpress 2.5.14
wordpress 4.9.5
elementor WHICH VERSION ?

IS working and always has been ?

Is the above all correct?

[@galt Participant 6 years, 8 months ago]

I had previously been able to create subforums, but not sure of software config when I did so.
It happened with all versions of elementor available to , up thru 2.0.7 (this morning)

But you can close this ticket.

Afte extensive testing, I was able to trace the problem as follows:

The parent-child feature breaks when activating elementor to allow editing of forum post types. When I disabled this capability, it started working correctly again.

I don’t know if this affects other post types, or if allowing other page builders to edit forum post types would cause the same problem. I leave the second issue in your hands, in case you find additional form builders with the same problem. I suppose it is easy enough to test if you have other builders available such as Beaver that allow various post types.

[@robin-w Moderator 6 years, 8 months ago]

thanks for the update

[@cosmiclove1978 Participant 2 years, 10 months ago]

Thank you, Galt! Almost 4 years later, this Elementor-Bbpress post type conflict still remains unresolved but your solution provides a good fix!

#Grateful