I’ve had a forum for over a year now, and it’s extremely active. It gets hundreds of posts a day and it’s filled with rich media as well. I pay Word press for the speed and space!

The topics are set to receive 20 replies per page, and we’ve hit over 30k pages this year. unfortunately, if you’re the 18th, 19th, or 20th post on the page, when you hit reply, it takes you to a blank page, with no pagination to help you navigate back to what you last read.

This is a massive inconvenience to my subscribers. It forces them to completely exit the forum, come back in, and then manually sift through a dozen pages, in order to continue. It’s not uncommon to produce 10 pages a day, so it’s a real hassle.

I’ve lost well over 20% of my following as a result. I’ve tried to hire a professional to fix it, but none of them are capable, and they all end up telling me to leave BB Press for a different platform.

What can I do?

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years ago]

Hey there, sorry that you’re having this trouble.

Can you include a link to your forums so we can check them out?

Topic pagination can sometimes be thrown off by non-public replies, especially for moderators that have the ability to see them.

Pagination is also somewhat weird with hierarchical/threaded replies. That’s been a known issue since the beginning. It’s based on how WordPress does it with Comments, but has some extra behaviors due to the front-end nature of topic moderation.

Sorry again. We will figure it out!

[@armyadarkness Participant 5 years ago]

That would be awesome! We’ve been fighting with it for so long, and I’ve really lost a ton of traffic from it, so solving it would be huge. The forum is normally private, but I’ll unlock it right now.

You’ll notice that most users whom have stuck it out, will post ghost material at the beginning of each page, in order to burn through the glitch and get back to pagination.

SCTMMC Forum

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years ago]

As a logged out user, I can’t see any problem with pagination in your 4 topics.

There is a general bbPress bug, that nobody should ever really see, where pagination pages beyond the actual number of pages, will not 404 the way it should. But because bbPress never links to them anywhere, someone would have to manually type the URL wrong to see it.

Any other guidance you can give will be great!

[@armyadarkness Participant 5 years ago]

Do you see the ghosts that everyone posts from it? It occurs every 18-20 posts. I can certainly register you if that’ll help diagnose.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years ago]

I mean… sure? Some posts have ghost emoji in them, but they aren’t at the top of any/every page, and I’m not sure how they would even know to time their posts like that in such an active environment. Not saying they can’t; just seems like a lot of work.

Pagination gets calculated based on the Forums Settings, so the “top” reply should not even be a real thing. It’s not stored anywhere. It’s not a special value. It’s just mathematically there.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years ago]

Have you tried running any of the repair tools?

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years ago]

A total of 90 posts in your forums have a 👻 in them. Nearly all are from a single Moderator. It’s possible his counts are off because of his ability to see pending/spam/trashed replies, but that’s just a guess.

Is it possible that some discussion keywords are causing posts to go into moderation? They hit reply, it gets stuck in pending, and then they try again with different words?

[@armyadarkness Participant 5 years ago]

Okay, I can see that this will be tough to explain. They’re not timing their postings of the ghost… They’re posting ghost pictures whenever they land on the “Ghost Page”.

In a perfect world, if you responded to post number 30 of 40, after you hit submit, it would take you back to the last post that you read, and then allow you to continue reading. Our forum has never done that. On our forum, if you respond to post 30 of 40, after hitting reply, you’ll be looking at post 41.

In that case, you have to use the pagination to navigate back to the post that you last read, so that you can continue following along.

However, it gets even more complicated. I have each page set to allow 20 posts before a new page starts, so if your #41 reply, happens to be the 21st post, it would start a new page. This makes sense.

The only problem is, instead of it doing that, if you’re the 18, 19, or 20th post, it’ll take you to a blank page, with no pagination on it. Therefore, you cannot navigate back to what you last read, even manually.

Your only choice is to exit the forum, re enter it, and then select a page, one back from the most current. OR you simply post anything three times, and then the pagination will reappear.

This is when a user will post host memes, pictures, etc. Very fitting. And it save them from exiting and re entering.

[@armyadarkness Participant 5 years ago]

That could be… I can tell you that the moderator does not ever actually moderate anything. And, the forum is usually locked… Private. You must be registered to read or post in it, and yet my daily users constantly lose posts to the spam filter. Why would the software think that a regular poster was spam? Especially when I have to unspam them daily?

[@armyadarkness Participant 5 years ago]

Okay they’re just reporting that a few users got ghost pages in the G&L Club thread

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years ago]

When someone hits a blank page, what’s the URL for it?

[@armyadarkness Participant 5 years ago]

It’s not a blank page. It’s an empty reply box, but with no pagination or ability to navigate. I’ve screen shotted it, but of course I can’t upload here.

Here’s the url from the one that I just got

G&L Musical Instrument Club

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years ago]

The only problem is, instead of it doing that, if you’re the 18, 19, or 20th post, it’ll take you to a blank page, with no pagination on it.

Please excuse my being confused. However specific and accurate you can be, is the only way we can track this down together.

The next time you see the “empty reply box with no pagination or ability to navigate” can you view the source of the page and share that somehow? That may help us better understand what you’re seeing without actually seeing it.

[@armyadarkness Participant 5 years ago]

As I already mentioned, it’s a very confusing phenomenon, so I don’t blame you being confused. Very easy to show, very difficult to explain, and that’s precisely why we have not yet renewed our annual subscription to WP. It takes months to resolve things there.

I really don’t understand what you’re asking me to do, and I’m certainly frustrated that a picture of the issue can’t be posted, but thanks for trying.

Our renewal expired a week ago and Word Press extended it 30 for us to see if we can fix the forum before we leave. It’s not looking good.