BuddyPress.org

Hi,

I’ve run into an issue that appears to be caused by BuddyPress when deleting terms (categories, tags, and custom taxonomies) in WordPress admin.

When I delete a term in wp-admin (for example a category or a custom taxonomy term), I get the following error message:

“An error occurred while processing your request. Please try again later.”

However, after reloading the page, the term is actually deleted successfully.

– Deleting posts and comments works without any issues
– The problem affects:
– Categories (category)
– Tags (post_tag)
– Custom taxonomies (e.g. from PublishPress Series)
– No errors are logged in:
– wp-content/debug.log
– Apache error log

When deleting the same term using WP-CLI, everything works perfectly:

bash wp term delete category <term_id>

– No errors
– Term is deleted correctly

I disabled all plugins and then re-enabled them one by one. The issue only occurs when BuddyPress is active. With BuddyPress deactivated, term deletion works normally in wp-admin (no error message)

In our system we use PublishPress Series, which registers a custom taxonomy called series. We have currently ~440 terms in this taxonomy
– The number is continuously growing
– The issue started appearing when the number of terms became relatively large

This might indicate a scaling issue or something triggered by higher term counts.

– The term is deleted successfully via wp_delete_term
– Something in BuddyPress interferes with the response afterward
– Possibly an issue with AJAX response (invalid JSON, unexpected output, etc.)

Has anyone seen this behavior before?

Is there anything in BuddyPress that hooks into term deletion (e.g. activity, notifications, or other components) that could break the admin AJAX response without triggering a PHP error?

Could this be related to the number of terms in a taxonomy?

We have also a similar problem when creating terms. No error messages in wp-admin but when clicking create it doesn’t look like that the term has been created. But when reloading the page the term is there.

Any pointers on where in BuddyPress this might happen would be greatly appreciated.

– WordPress: latest version
– BuddyPress: latest version
– PHP: 8.3 (PHP-FPM)

Thanks!