I have a BuddyPress installation with forums activated. Everything works great, except from time-to-time the forum urls give us 404 errors.

One minute the mydomain.com/groups/mygroup/forum works great, the next minute, it gives me a 404 error. The only way to get the urls to work again is to simply visit the BuddyPress Forum Settings page in wp-admin. That is right – visit. We don’t need to save the settings or anything; simply visiting the forum settings page fixes the 404 errors.

Any ideas on what might be causing this problem?

Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot this?

Thanks!
Toby

[@themightymo Participant 12 years, 5 months ago]

FYI, I am using WP 3.4.1 with BP 1.5.6.

[@djpaul Keymaster 12 years, 5 months ago]

Don’t know. There’s nothing magic hidden on the forums setting page.

[@themightymo Participant 12 years, 5 months ago]

Thanks for the reply, Paul.

Here is a 30-second screencast I made showing the issue in action as well as the weird solution.

[@mercime Participant 12 years, 5 months ago]

Strange. What about regular members? Can they see forums page?

Also, since you’re not using Group Forums, disable Discussion Forums in menu BuddyPress > Components. Go back to your sitewide forums page and check if it’s working properly.

[@themightymo Participant 12 years, 5 months ago]

@mercime – We are using group forums. We are, however, rewriting the urls using the forum slug constant in wp-config.php.

It is weird, because this is only happening on our DEV environment. It seems to be working fine on LIVE.

Any other thoughts? Possible avenues to explore?