My WordPress site with latest version of WP Discourse is returning on every post under the discourse tab:
There was an error returning the category list from Discourse.
The logs are full of errors
[2025-09-22 00:10:14] comment.ERROR: sync_comments.get_discourse_category {"message":"The categories key was not found in the response from Discourse."}
[2025-09-30 00:15:49] comment.ERROR: sync_comments.get_discourse_category {"message":"The categories key was not found in the response from Discourse."}
I have remade the API key several times, its granted to an admin user account. The instructions under API key do not match my discourse API options. If I set the option to “All Users” there is no option to set the User, I only see that if I use the option for “Single User”
I got busy and forgot to reply. I cannot be sure since this is a WordPress site for the organization I work for. My colleagues who post there have not made much use of it, so I cannot be sure how long ago when I remember it worked correctly- maybe months.
No hosting change or cloudflare use. There has likely been new plugins. No change was made to discourse settings . I activated more logging when I noticed the problem.
Is there any other way to test what the discourse response is- as all the logs indicate is”
[2025-10-14 00:13:18] comment.ERROR: sync_comments.get_discourse_category {"message":"The categories key was not found in the response from Discourse."}
Sorry I cannot be specific, my focus is not on the tech stack, and my server admin is pretty weak on WordPress.
If possible, could you share a link to your wordpress and discourse instances? If that’s not possible, please have a look at the /site.json endpoint of your discourse. For example if you go to meta.discourse.org/site.json you’ll see some JSON that includes a categories list. Essentially that error appears if:
Your Discourse instance returns a non-error response; but
There’s no categories in your site.json for some reason.
The most likely cause of this is still that described in the topic @Lilly linked. If you could try walking through the steps in this topic and check whether you still have a valid connection to your Discourse:
