Support Forum

Let's just get this out of the way first... 'having upgraded everything to the latest versions and having paid a premium for the latest Simple Press.'  Your problem has nothing to do with upgrading otherwise all other users would see this problem but it is, in fact, quite unique to your website at the moment. And Simple:Press is free to use.

And then this one 'PROVE this isnt a text or formatting issue'  Again I would like to know if this was using MS Word or was it all plain text because if it was Word then it proves nothing of the sort. I can not stress how important this is. Word can quite easily turn a short couple of paragraphs into a full page of hidden text. So we do need to know. 

And if this happening to not just you one thing it might be worth asking your hosting support about would be the max post size and max post variables settings in your php ini file as it might just be that what you are posting is just too big for the server to handle with current settings if they are set quite small.

On the first point then I very much doubt you can open and view the php ini file.

I have just done a search here on the 'forum not set' message as it pops up rarely but every now and then. There seem to be two items that crop up apart from the settings already mentioned which - as I said - might come into play with really large post content.

The first is the use of 'mod_security' on your server. It seems to less commonly used recently - perhaps because of all the problems it causes so many websites - but some hosts probably still like to use it. It looks for patterns in the post data being sent to the server in a search for something malicious. If it finds a match then it essentially destroys the post variables. This fits the experience because the first post variable we check for is the ID of the forum and if it is not there you get the message you see. Basically - it just should not happen unless something has really gone wrong at the server end.

While the use of mod_security sounds useful and good, in practice it is the bane of every web developers life as it causes nothing but problems. If this IS the cause then it will come down to a specific phrase, word or combination of characters being used. But once again - you will need to talk to your host support. If they DO have it installed on your site I would ask them to disable it for you to test the theory.

The second thing that has come up in the past is simply a conflict with another WordPress plugin of some sort. And this may be more common and also something more easily checked. For example, if this problem is relatively new and recent - then does it actually coincide with installing a new WP plugin of some kind. Or maybe one that also got updated. Easy to test of course because you could just disable any other plugins and then try the post again.