Troubleshooting

Symptoms are listed by what you actually see. Each entry says what to check first.

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The anonymous checkbox does not appear

Work through these in order.

1. Are you logged in? The checkbox is never shown to logged-out visitors. Anonymous posting is for members, not guests.
2. Is the location enabled? Check General Settings and confirm the toggle for that surface (sitewide activity, groups, profiles, comments, forums) is on. The Overview tab shows all of them at a glance.
3. Is your role allowed? If Role Based Anonymous Posting has any roles selected, only those roles see the checkbox. An empty list means everyone.
4. Are you an excluded member type? Check Exclude Member Types.
5. Is BP Verified Member active with verification required? If so, unverified members do not see the checkbox.
6. For forums: the Forums toggle only exists when bbPress or BuddyBoss Platform is active. If the Overview tab shows Forums as Unavailable, install one of those first.

Administrators bypass rules 3 to 5, so if you can see the checkbox as an admin but a member cannot, the cause is almost always one of those three.

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Anonymous posts show the real author

First: check your plugin version. Versions 1.6.1 and earlier had a defect that exposed the real author on anonymous forum posts to logged-out visitors and to members outside the allowed-roles list. Update to 1.6.2 or later, then purge any page cache or CDN in front of your forums.

If you are on 1.6.2 or later and still see a real name:

• Is the post actually marked anonymous? Posts created before you enabled the feature, or created without ticking the box, are ordinary posts and are not retroactively masked.
• Are you viewing as an administrator or moderator on an admin screen? That is intended. Admin screens show the real author so moderation works.
• Does a third-party plugin or custom template render the author? This plugin masks the surfaces it knows about. A theme template reading post_author directly, or another plugin with its own author markup, prints the real name. Test by switching to a default theme.

See Anonymity and privacy for the full list of what is and is not hidden.

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The anonymous avatar is a broken image

Fixed in 1.6.2. Earlier versions could save a corrupted value when you clicked Reset to default.

Updating to 1.6.2 repairs this automatically - the plugin detects an unusable avatar value on read and falls back to the bundled default. You do not need to touch the setting.

If it is still broken after updating, open General Settings, choose an image explicitly with Choose Image, and save.

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My custom display name or checkbox label is ignored

• In forums, before 1.6.2: both the anonymous display name and the forum checkbox label were ignored on forum surfaces. Update to 1.6.2.
• On dynamically loaded reply forms, before 1.6.2: BuddyBoss reply popups always printed the default label. Update to 1.6.2.
• After updating: if a label is still wrong, clear any page or object cache, then hard-reload the form page so the updated script is fetched.

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Anonymous forum posting switched itself off

Fixed in 1.6.2. Previously, saving any setting while bbPress or BuddyBoss was deactivated silently set the Forums toggle to off, and it stayed off after you reactivated the forum plugin.

On 1.6.2 and later your saved value is preserved while the row is hidden. If you were bitten by the old behaviour, simply switch Forums back on once.

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Members are getting notified about anonymous posts

Notifications and emails for anonymous posts are suppressed by design, so a mention or reply does not reveal who acted.

If notifications are still arriving:

• Confirm the post really was anonymous.
• Check whether a third-party notification plugin is generating them independently. This plugin can only suppress the BuddyPress and BuddyBoss notification paths it hooks.

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The Discover tab will not install a plugin

See the failure table on the Discover tab page. The most common causes are blocked outbound HTTPS and hosts that require FTP credentials for plugin installs.

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Getting help

When contacting support, include:

• Plugin version, WordPress version, PHP version
• Whether you run BuddyPress or BuddyBoss Platform, and the version
• Whether bbPress is active
• Your active theme
• The exact surface where the problem appears (sitewide activity, group, profile, forum topic, forum reply)
• Whether the problem appears when logged out, as a member, or as an admin

That last point matters more than it sounds. Several past issues behaved differently depending on who was viewing.