I recently came across a problem that I resolved, but noticed that other people had the same problem but no resolution was offered. I made a bbPress post in the backend of a WordPress site and for some strange reason it crashed my website with a ‘500 Error – Internal Server Error’.
Upon reflection I found out what caused this issue. It was the fact I made a forum reply but without a title. Forum replies have no title when you see them listed in the backend of the site, so I left it out to follow suit. This turned out to be a mistake but it was the first time I made a forum reply using the backend of the site, so didn’t realise this would be a problem.
Upon further investigation I found that the forum still worked, but the rest of the site was down. Very strange since the last action was a forum reply. I then had an aha moment. The forum used a template with no sidebars while the rest of the site had a right hand sidebar. This meant the problem had to be the Forum replies widget in the sidebar that was present in the rest of the site. It was set to show the latest 12 replies, and because the last reply had no title, the widget spat the dummy affecting all pages with that widget present. The fix was easy once I worked that out.
I could either:
- Remove the widget and place it into the Inactive Widget section and restore it later (after 12 new forum replies are made in my case);
- Make 12 forum replies myself forcing 12 new replies to show up in the widget thereby flushing out the reply that had no title;
- Make a forum reply and set the replies widget to show one reply and change it back once 11 more replies are made or whatever number of replies your widget is set to.
BTW, I should mention that the reply without a title couldn’t be removed in the backend of the site as it wouldn’t load the replies list properly due to not having a title. So it seems it is very bad to make a reply in the backend of the site and not give it a title.
I hope this fix helps someone out there. If so, let me know in the comments below.