We have an ongoing issue with registered users periodically getting an overall forums landing page with no forums shown.
Each time this happens, I use the "Delete All Caches" button and the forums all magically appear again.
I want to stop this happening altogether as it is damaging the reputation of the business when customers keep reporting they can't get into the forum.
For context, this was happening much more often, so I turned off wpForo's internal caching (set "Enable Cache" to "No" in "Board Settings"). The WordPress site uses W3 Total Cache and I have set the following URL exceptions to the Page Caching as per the wpForo instructions:
wp-.*\.php index\.php /community/ /participant/ /sign-up/ /sign-in/ /change-password/
However, somehow wpForo is still caching a blank overall forums page (or something similar) forcing us to have to use the Delete All Caches button each time a user reports the issue. So far, we cannot nail down the circumstances that cause this.
Should I be adding more URL exceptions to W3 Total Cache? Is there any other settings I should be making to disable the wpForo internal cache? Could something else be storing some clashing information that wpForo uses for it's caching?
Hi @Chris,
No, I have Nginx + Apache on the server end and the only server caching option is Nginx caching which is disabled. The only option enabled is "smart static file processing" for Nginx.
The only thought that occurred to me over the weekend is that the forum has the default base slug of "community", but we have a some pages that have a base slug of "community-portal" which will be cached... could they be causing any kind of clash (just considering if your caching doesn't cater for the closing "/" in the URL bases).
Please navigate to Dashboard > Pages, find Forum page and check hats the Page slug, after that go to Dashboard > wpForo > Board, Edit the Default Board and check is the page slug the same as the board slug.
@chris the Forum Page slug and the default board slug are both configured as "community". The pageid on the default board points to the correct Page.
Then find where "community-portal" is. Maybe some menus? Does that page exist in your WP pages dashboard?
Also in your FORUM pages html source (view it with your browser), is there ANY caching signature at the end?
And to be honest W3TC probably is the cause.
Can you post your URL?
@dimalifragis thank you for this, I had forgotten to check for the comment signature. The forum page does indeed have the W3 Total Cache signature, despite being specifically configured not to cache it.
I'll take this issue up with them.
Thank you very much for pointing me to the correct evidence!
@daveboulden Good to know.
Do not forget to resolve also from where your "community-portal" comes from and fix it.
@dimalifragis I know where they are from, they are pages I created. Does it need fixing? Technically the URL bases are different, e.g.:
/community-portal/resources - one of the WordPress pages /community/yoga-announcements - a sub-forum in wpForo
Should I change the base slug of the forum (e.g. to "/forum/") so that it is completely different to any of the page slugs?
"/community-portal/resources - one of the WordPress page" what does that mean? I don't understand. Is that outside wpForo?
Do not change anything as wpForo base page ("community" as you say) because it will deindex your current forum in search engines and upset your in-site SEO.
"/community-portal/resources - one of the WordPress page" is a standard WordPress page, outside of the wpForo content.
Our forum is not public (it requires membership to access) and so is not indexed by any search engines.
@daveboulden Ok, then change nothing, just remove W3TC from wpForo. And see if your issues are resolved.
If you do not have a particular reason to use W3TC, please use some other plugin for caching. WP Super Cache or Fastest Cache.
@dimalifragis I have really only used W3TC as it has performed well for me on other sites and links in well with REDIS.
I'm relatively new to wpForo, so does W3TC have a history of issues working in conjunction with wpForo?
@daveboulden No caching works with wpForo. Plugin or server cache (memcacheD, Redis etc etc).
https://wpforo.com/community/faq/wpforo-and-cache-plugins/
No caching for wpForo. If used with wpForo, you can have mild issues (like serving OLD pages) or fatal ones (like db corruption).
@dimalifragis I don't want to cache the forum pages, but I absolutely have to cache all the other content in the WordPress site, hence why I am trying to get the correct exceptions configured into the general cache so that it leaves wpForo alone.
@daveboulden Right. It would be easy to exclude W3TC.
About REDIS i don't think so, unless you have access to the server and know what to do.
@dimalifragis I run the site on a dedicated server that I also setup to run the Redis service, so have full access to it all. I would just need to know which objects and database tables to exclude from the REDIs caching.
@daveboulden I think you just need to exclude wpForo page(s) and not what you mention.
Still i'm not sure, just from what i have read.
@dimalifragis The pages are being excluded from page caching, but I'll also need to tell Redis what objects and database queries to avoid caching also. Perhaps @Chris can suggest what needs to be excluded here?