likely going to come down to js conflict…  please see:  https://simple-press.com/documentation/codex/faq/troubleshooting/what-is-this-jquery-conflict/

also, any errors or info  you can provide from your browser console?  see:  https://simple-press.com/documentation/codex/faq/troubleshooting/what-is-this-jquery-conflict/

also make sure you are not using a caching plugin that is trying to cache the forum page as the page is dynamically generated…

if you give us link to your site, we can look for obvious conflicts…

Looking at the browser console no errors are shown when the page loads, clicking the dropped down icon shows these errors:

The page has themes installed, is live on a server but is on a temporary domain and is not currently indexed by search engines and will be migrated to a new domain before being accessed by the pubic

yeah so lots of js errors there…  they need to be resolved…  most seem to be from some embed player…  did you read the first link?  like its using its own version of jquery or jquery ui vice the one that comes with wp… but cannot tell if its not accessible…

I read through the first link and everything I could see is coming from our domain.

I am sending you a PM with the forum link, please let me know what permissions you need

so nothing jumps out, but a as guest with no access, a lot of stuff is not active (like the editor), so its hard to tell…  would need access to post and access to edit our posts forever (so we can actually get the toolbar to be enabled)…  so if you can, create a temp account and pm the details to Mr Papa, yellow swordfish and ike… again, please link back to this topic so we know what its about…

OK… when I log in to the site, load a topic and click on the tools button I would expect a small popup menu to appear. What I do NOT expect is to see (roughly – they were hard to count) is 37 http ajax calls from what looks to be a combination of WP theme and plugins before the whole thing errors out…!

And some of the responses among those 37 ajax calls are returning quite large amounts of html and, in some cases, more javascript…

I think the first task is to find out what is responsible for this vast amount of unusual and resource hungry activity. Note that some of the processes are also using deprecated jQuery functionality which is not good. And somewhere, along the way of these calls, I think you will find that the jQuery UI scripts are ceasing to function.

So can we start there please? First task always – identify the area of conflict! 

So I went through and sorted out all of our plug ins, deleting the unnecessary/deactivated.

Then updated everything.

Finally all plug ins other then simple press where deactivated and everything worked.

Turning on the plug ins one at a time the issue was in a redirect plug in.

The issue was apparently the “(.*)?.*action=.*” redirect which was placed into the site by an SEO specialist to fix some potential problems when we port the site to its public location.

With this redirect deactivated the toolbox and the forum behave correctly

Thanks for your help.

Very obscure but explains it. That would essentially filter and alter our ajax urls which would throw everything off. Good find.