Category Archives: bbPress

bbPress forum reply broke WordPress site

bbPress No Comments
Error 500

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:

  1. 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);
  2. Make 12 forum replies myself forcing 12 new replies to show up in the widget thereby flushing out the reply that had no title;
  3. 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.

Is bbPress spamming too many topics and replies?

bbPress Spam No Comments
bbPress pending post

If you have upgraded to bbPress 2.6.3, you may have noticed that moderation is a lot stricter now. While this is good for forums that get spammed a lot, it can be really annoying for private forums with a trustworthy member base or smaller community based forums with familiar members as it adds a lot more moderation work and is also annoying for members.

So how do you fix moderation so members legitimate posts stop being placed into moderation? After all, as an Admin, the last thing you want to do is spend the rest of your life approving forum replies.

It seems content rich discussions are being penalized and replies are increasingly placed into the moderation queue after a simple post edit or even a new reply being placed into moderation for what seems like no reason at all. Here is a simple solution that will likely fix the issue:

  1. Go to Settings > Discussion
  2. Scroll down to ‘Comment Moderation’.
  3. You will see how many links you are allowed before a comment is held in the queue. Chances are it will be two links. Increase this number and bear in mind that external images and videos are links. If your community regularly posts multiple images and videos then increase links to say 10 or 12. Just remember that spammers posts links, so increasing this will enable these spammers posts to get through as well.

That’s it. If this doesn’t fix the issue entirely, then there maybe other things you can do, but upping the amount of links before moderation will save moderators a lot of work.