I should add that i had no problems before the last update, i have not installed any other plugins recently or changed settings on any other plugin, i do have Cloudflare enabled, that was the only recent addition but that was days ago, Cloudflare wouldn’t cause a loss of a category, the issue happened after using WP Optimize today.
I use the remove post revisions, remove auto drafts, remove transient options, remove orphaned post meta, remove unused tags and optimize the database, i don’t have any automatic scheduling switched on.
I do have the WordPress Cron disabled using htaccess but that hasn’t been an issue in the past.
I thought it a transient issue simply because everything worked before that feature was added, it might also be a new revision to the optimize section, i will do a backup before using the plugin in future just in case, i do value the plugin a lot and appreciate your work on it.
I’ve ran into the same problem. I have a few parent categories that disappeared, and I can’t find the subcategories in the category list in the Post subsection.
Any suggestions?
I do not run any query on categories .. unless your categories are inside transient options.. The only thing I can think of is remove post meta or unused tags options.. those queries has joins but still none of them actually touching any categories…
Sounds like it was the post meta option for me then, can’t be the tags.
postmeta cleanup is touching – wp_postmeta table
tags cleanup touching – wp_terms table
transient cleanup is touching – wp_options table
in my understanding .. terms table may contain the categories but i am sure i am using the filter ‘post_tag’ as filter.. is it possible that your blog has categories setup as tags?
I would recommend not to run the – Remove unused tags – option. Since it is the only query that is touching wp_terms table (where the categories are)
I’ll check later, what i might do is a backup of the site and then try deleting the tags, that way if it happens again i can come back and tell you for sure and just run the backup to restore the site.
Same issue here. wp-optimied removed two child categories.
Carlos
I have just done a test.
It was the remove unused tags that did the damage, once again it removed the exact same category, the strange thing is that i don’t think i am using tags as a category in WordPress.
The transient options removal and postmeta removal is fine and does not affect the site, it was the tags that did the damage.
Confirming that the tags optimization leads to categories deletion. I had to restore the wp_terms table from backup else all my posts would be blank.
Same here.
Glad to know it was that so I can prevent it from happening to my other (more loaded) sites.
This is so frustrating. I’ve lost many categories. Now I have to run a test restore version of my site to figure out how many and which categories are gone. It’s going to take my whole life to reinstate them all.
Massive glitch for this plugin. Giving 0 stars.
Not all people are experiencing the same problem as you guys have.
But I guess, if I see enough problem reports, I will disable that tag cleanup feature.
Meanwhile, this is the reason – some of the new features were marked red. I was unable to replicate this situation on any of my sites.
@bnd83, I surely hope it won’t take your whole life. And this plugin is experimental. Also under GPL, I do not provide warranty for these. All the new feature are marked RED as caution. Sorry it happened to you. Thanks for the 0 Stars anyways.
get updated to the latest version 1.5.6 – tags cleanup is disabled and removed.
There’s a slight imprecision in your patch notes:
“Unused Tags cleanup” option made a problem on some WordPress sites that it deletes empty categories. Since I am unable to replicate this problem. I am making this option disabled.
The above is not true.
My categories are full and they get deleted none the less.
They just happen to be the last “leaf” in a hierarchy, maybe the empty-ness test only manages the top level?
I have created 3 different sub categories to test it out..
tested as eg.
Cat 1 (empty)
- Cat 2 (empty)
-- Cat 2-A (empty)
- Cat 3 (contains one post)
None of them got deleted. that made me think – it is not about top level categories. The query uses a inner join to find out “post_tag” from taxonomy which is counted zero. So the possibility for this is .. categories returning as post tags which are empty so they gets deleted.
I am open to your code help @dfumagalli 🙂 .. you can email me at plugins(at)ruhanirabin.com – We can discuss about the sql query. Thanks :_)
