I’ve created a forum with 2 groups – each with forums and sub-forums. Group A, Forum 1, displays its sub-forums in a blank forum field, rather than showing as sub-forums in Forum 1. Here is a screenshot to illustrate what I’m describing:
Here is how I have it configured in the backend:
I have no idea what is causing this. 
that’s very disturbing – and not something we have seen before…
Can you try something for me? Could you edit say, the ‘Jail Programs” forum – maybe just change the title slightly (we can correct that afterwards) – and then update/save. See if that re-aligns the data….
Sorry for the late reply… I changed the title of the forum but it had no effect on the layout.
I believe I know the problem but not yet the reason…
Could you try this for me. The two ‘estranged’ sub-forums: Could you edit them and make then standard forums? Just change the option and update the forum. Do this for each. Following that, edit them again and change them back to sub-forums under the correct parent forum – ‘Jail programs’.
Does that fix it?
And if it does – can you tell me if these two sub-forums were once attached to a different parent? I notice that forum id’s 2, 3 and 4 are missing so have clearly at some point existed and been removed. Is it possible these two estranged sub-forums once belonged to one of those?
I’d already tried that. It has no effect, and yes, the forum structure was changed at one point. The client wanted to reorganize things, so I had to move things around a little.
Sorry can you explain that please? Do you mean changing ‘Art Forum’ and ‘Mens Honor Farm Yoga and meditation’ from a sub-forum to a main, standard forum does nothing? What happens? Do they remain sub-forums after updating?
Do you have access to the database so that you could look up some data if we needed it?
Changing them to parent forums has them display properly in the admin and frontend. When I change them back to sub-forums, they display properly in the backend, but still show up in their own blank parent forum – as the screenshot shows at the start of this post.
In short, changing their hierarchy has no effect in terms of trying to get them to display properly as sub-forums of Jail Programs.
I have database access.
That is most odd. Is there any chance you could send me an export SQL dump of just your sfforums table? If so you an send it to support at simple-press dot com and I will look at the data to see if I can spot anything wrong…
mmm… I see nothing wrong in the data.
So – next question. What version of SP are you using here? I know we had one or two problems with sub-forum display with an early V5 version until – if I recall correctly – there were topics in the sub-forums.
So – if not on the most current version can you upgrade that and any SP plugins you may have active to see if the problem persists?
I realise it might sound somewhat trite but try as I might I can not replicate this and I have just spent another 10 minutes staring at your data and can see nothing wrong with it. And we have lots of users with sub-forums (including one I was talking to yesterday with a somewhat daunting 297 of them!).
All I mean by this is that we are clearly looking for something unique here that I am not seeing and I am sorry this is taking so long to sort out.
Perhaps we can try something else… Could you perhaps create an initial topic in one or both of those sun-forums to see if this make any difference? It shouldn’t but I am bit bereft of ideas at the moment.