The Author Page and WP Posts Shows 0 Entries with Plugin Enabled!

[saadirfan]

I inherited a weird bug to troubleshoot. — We have an author with over 3k posts.

With the co-authors plugin enabled:

• The author page and WP Posts pages show the author has no entries
• The author field on their post is empty

With the co-authors plugin disabled:

• The author page and WP Posts pages show all 3k entries
• The author field on their posts shows their name just fine

Here is what I've tried:

1. Deleted the user and re-assigned to a new user using WP CLI tools.
2. Checked: post_author field in the wp-posts table shows the correct author ID.
3. No traces of 'cap-xxx" in wp-postmeta for any entries.
4. No Guest Author with this email or display name

Here is what I think could help me:

• What are the possible keywords I can search for in the database to check the post vs. author relation? And what database tables do co-authors use to store relations?
• Any function recommendation to re-assign and correct the relation in the database? (I already tried deleting the user and re-assigning. So it suggests I need to look for a relation by the post ID. But, so far, no luck there either).

Again, disabling the co-authors plugin fixes the issue.

WP: Version 6.0.2 (VIP hosted) Co-Authors Plus: Version 3.5.2

[saadirfan]

If it matters, the issue first appeared when a team member attempted to delete and reassign the author's content to a new profile because their business email address changed.

Old Profile: Name: JOHN SMITH Email: john(at)olddomain.com

New Profile: Name: JOHN SMITH (same display name) Email: john(at)newdomain.com

[saadirfan]

Further, the Authors meta box appears empty for these posts.

[rebeccahum]

@saadirfan Have you run the backfill CLI command wp co-authors-plus create-terms-for-posts?

[saadirfan]

@rebeccahum I just ran the command and got the following. But no changes on the front-end side. The author in question is still missing old posts and only showing recently added (new) entries. Again, disabling the plugin brings back all entries.

Updating author terms with new counts
Success: Done! Of 100244 posts, 15 now have author terms.

[bmoredrew]

@saadirfan Did you fix this? I had a similar issue and the wp cli command did not fix it.

I found extra entries for those users in wp_term_taxonomy - removing the incorrect ones solved this. In my case they were with ones that had a 0 in the count column. One of the users also had a mismatch term_id and term_taxonomy_id

You can verify which ones are correct by searching for each users respective term_id in wp_term_relationships where you'll find all the mapping for their posts.