[Mike Witt]

I’m not exactly sure how to describe this problem. But I’ve seen this happen twice now. The situation is that there are several forums, and each one has a “sticky” post at the top, describing the guidelines for the particular forum.

At some point, the post at the top of one forum is duplicated on all the forums. So forums B, C, D, … all have the “forum A Guideline” post at the top of them (in addition to their own guideline post).

I’m not very good with images, but I hope this kind of shows what’s happening:

https://num9.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/foo.jpeg

FWIW, when I look in the database. The post in question shows its parent as the proper forum.

On a related note, I’d love to know how bbPress figures out the relationship between forums, topics, and posts. I see that each element has a pointer to its parent. But I haven’t been able to figure out where the pointers to a forum or post’s children are.

The only documentation I was able to find on the database is:

Stored Database Data

Could somebody point me to further documentation? Or let me know if I just need to read the code (specific pointers would be appreciated).

[Robin W]

topics can be ‘sticky’ or ‘super-sticky’

sticky posts go at the top of their forum
Super sticky posts go at the top of every forum

sounds like your topics are becoming super sticky

you can look at these in then backend

dashboard>topics>edit topics and select topic > topic attributes on top right hand side> Type

they can also be set in front end

where in the topic they show in admin as

stick (to front)

if you click the ‘stick’ then it is sticky, if you click the ‘(to front)’ it becomes super-sticky which is very easy to do by mistake.

on relationships, bbpress uses wordpress ‘post-parent’

so a reply has a post parent of the topic it belongs to
a topic has a post parent of the forum it belongs to
and a forum has a post parent of a forum if it is a sub forum, or a category if it belongs to a category

These relationships are also stored in the post_meta table

details on ‘children’ are not kept – for instance displaying topics is done by a function called bbp_has_topics which selects topics where the post_parent is the forum concerned. bbp_has_relies has a similar serach for replies where the post_parent is the topic concerned.

[Mike Witt]

You’re right, it was super-sticky. Pilot error, thank goodness!
And thank you very much for the database info.