What is it you change and what effect does it have?

I have to go to Options – Global Display Settings – Display Forum Stats and then change the update stats intervals to 2, then update, and then back to 1 and my top poster stats change to what they should read, but where I am in the admin part on the footer it never changes.

mmm – not sure why that would change some things and not others.

Can you go to the form admin > Toolbox > CRON Inspector and see if you have an entry in the Active’ list for ‘sph_stats_cron’? If so when is the next scheduled execution? Is it in the future?

If all looks good there try pasting sph_stats_cron into the Run CRON box at thye bottom and try udating the form to see if it runs and rebuilds the stats as expected.

It doesn’t say future, it says

That means your WordPress CRON system has lost it. We see this happen from time to time – no understanding of why and we hope, one day, the WP team will clean it up.
The best way to re-register all of the cron tasks is to deactivate (NOT uninstall) the plugin (SP) and then reactivate it again. This should restart the tasks with the WP cron system.

Thanks for that, I’ve tried deactivating the SP plugin and reactivating but it didn’t change it, so I’ve just manually done it like I do from time to time.  I wish WP would get it’s act together.

that suggests an issue with WP itself which is a bit worrying as quite a few WP/SP tasks -= not to mention other plugins – make use of the CRON system…

Would you recommend to backup my WP then  try and create a fresh install on my website. Sounds like a big job mind. 

No I wouldn’t think that would really help. But not sure what to suggest. It might be worth taking a look at the WordPress support forums to see if there are any clues.
By the way – were there any tasks in that list with future dates? You could watch them for a while to see if they get processed?

I’ve had a look and there are a few on the active list that haven’t worked since June last year or December..eeek…I will go and have a look at the WP forum to see if I can find a way to fix the problem.

Yes – that really does point to a WP breakdown in service. If I can I might go take a look as well see if anything pops up.

I’ve found this so I have added it, I will see what happens.

the effective .htaccess section to get wp-cron.php working again was:

<Files wp-cron.php>
allow from all
Satisfy Any
</Files>

So the NEXT guy suffering with wordpress behind .htaccess protection — add the above four lines to your .htaccess file in the WordPress directory (where wp-cron.php lives) and your cron events should be properly executed!

Oooh. Good one. Thanks for that

I’m watching my stats now, so in about 40 mins they should change because my members are posting.  I will let you know if this fixed the problem.  Thank you so much again for your help and advice, it is so much appreciated.