I’m having a similar problem to dustinarmstrong. But its not exactly the same.

I’m trying to fix a broken forum set up for a client. I did not do the forum installation (he did it himself) AND the forum is installed on a live site that gets lots of web traffic so I don’t want to do anything that might impact the website overall.

Here’s my situation:
1) BBPress was installed (I don’t have details about when and how),
2) a page was created with the [bbp-forum-index] shortcode on it
3) the forum didn’t work, so my client contacted me to fix it
4) I went into settings > forums and changed the forum root slug from the default “forum” to “travel-forums” (the name of the page where the shortcode lives. The error message “Possible bbPress conflict: Forum slug” showed up next to the slug field after saving the settings.
5) I also changed the single forum slug from the default “forum” to “travel-forums”. The error message “Possible bbPress conflict: Forums base” showed up next to the slug field after saving.

In my case, the forum page DOES show up at http://foobar.com/travel-forums but it is empty except for the welcome text that I had entered into the forum main window. (So it just says “Welcome to our forum” without any of the discussion topics showing up.

Also, I have the “Recent Topics” widget enabled on my sidebar and my three test discussion topics DO show up there. When I click on any of them they take me to the correct URL but the pages are blank. So, for example, when I click on “test topic” in the widget I land on http://foobar.com/travel-forums/topic/test-topic/ and the page displays the topic header “Test topic” and the topic question “what do you think about travel?” but it doesn’t display any of the posts.

I’m not sure if this behavior is related to the slug conflict error messages or if something else is wrong.

I’m trying to follow the advice that Stephen Edgar gave.

First up, I think this is probably true in my case:

most likely you have something else either titled or using the slug discuss and this includes any items in trash as even though they are in the trash they still reserve that slug and it is not released until the item is removed from the trash.

This is probably a stupid question but How do I empty the trash to make sure that the old slug is removed?

Second, I’d like to try this:

To fix this try resetting your permalinks. In your WordPress Administration Screens navigate to Settings > Permalinks, select a different permalink structure and save. Then select your preferred permalink structure and save again.

but since my website is live and has been for a long time (and has lots of blog posts using the custom structure already) I’m concerned that this could permanently break the existing links. Any thoughts on this?

[@netweb Keymaster 10 years, 4 months ago]

You cannot have both the ‘forum root’ and ‘forum slug’ the same as you have seen in that you get a ‘slug conflict’ warning, I’d suggest you leave the ‘forum root’ slug as travel-forums but change your forum slug back to forum.

To check the ‘trash’ visit your ‘posts’, ‘pages’, and ‘forums’ sections in WordPress and you should see if you have any posts, pages, or forums in the ‘trash’ (or bin if your using English UK WordPress language packs).

Have a look at those and let me know how it goes.