Categories and Tags for which “You need a higher level of permission”

Hi @hkoutdooraventures

Are you still having this issue? Can you describe the steps you are taking and where you are when you see the permissions error message?

Thanks for the screenshots. How strange that some terms work and some don’t!

Given that you also see these errors when you’re editing categories/tags directly, and not just when you’re using the block editor, makes me think that it might not actually be a Gutenberg issue.

I wonder if there are any patterns to which categories work and which ones don’t. Here’s a question: for the ones that don’t work, is there another taxonomy on your site that uses the same term? For example, your Coasteering category doesn’t work, right? Do you also have a “Coasteering” tag? Or a “Coasteering” term for some other type of content?

Ok, I think I know what’s going on here, but I’m not sure what the best way to fix it is. The short version is that it sounds like your WordPress has been configured to use something called global terms, which is where each term in the database can be shared by multiple taxonomies. However, this is old, deprecated behavior, and current versions of WordPress core mostly assume that terms are not shared, which is why you get the permission errors. Your site might have gotten configured this way if it’s been around since before version 4.7, and/or if you did something like migrate from WordPress.com.

So, if you are comfortable editing the files in your theme (back up everything first, of course), you could try turning off global terms by adding add_filter( 'global_terms_enabled', '__return_false' ); somewhere in your functions.phpfile. Do this at your own risk, though, because there could be weird side effects and I haven’t tested this. This might fix the problem going forward, but I’m not sure if it would affect the duplicate terms that you already have.

A safer method would be to add new terms with different slugs and switch all your posts over. So for example, add a new Coasteering tag, but make sure the slug is coasteering-2 or something so it’s different from the category one. This doesn’t solve the root issue though, because you’ll have to remember to keep doing it as you add new categories/tags.

If you have a paid Jetpack plan, you could also try reaching out to their support to see if they have any ideas, since the problem doesn’t seem to occur with the Android app.

Anyway, it’s a really tricky problem. Hopefully one of these solutions will work for you.