Blocksy Pro Author Box doesn’t update after changing author

Thanks for the detailed write-up @fierys, that’s enormously helpful.

The behaviour you are describing matches the issue tracked in #1252. In short: when the Authors panel in the editor cannot resolve one of the saved author term IDs, the panel can persist data that leaves wp_posts.post_authorout of sync with the chosen co-author. That is exactly why deactivating Co-Authors Plus reverts the post to “Administrator”, and why a Quick Edit save resolves it (Quick Edit goes through a different code path that always re-syncs post_author).

The fix is in #1253, already merged to develop, and will ship in the next release. It is not in 4.0.2.

If you are happy to help me verify, two questions:

1. When you open a fresh post in the editor as Administrator, does the Authors panel show a brief spinner before resolving your name, or does it show a spinner that never goes away?
2. If you remove the Administrator entry before adding the new author (rather than after), does the saved result differ at all?

In the meantime, the Quick Edit workaround you have already discovered is the reliable path until the next release lands.

Thanks for the help so far. I’ve tried to reproduce this on a clean WordPress 6.9.4 site running Co-Authors Plus 4.0.2 with the Twenty Twenty-Five theme and no other plugins, going through the same flow you described, and wp_posts.post_author is correctly updated to the chosen author after publish. So I think there’s something in your specific environment that’s interfering with the sync.

A few things that would help me narrow it down:

1. The list of all active plugins on the site.
2. Whether the site uses a persistent object cache (Redis, Memcached, or a plugin like W3 Total Cache, Redis Object Cache, etc).
3. If you switch to a default theme like Twenty Twenty-Five and repeat the publish flow with no other changes, does the bug still occur?
4. If yes to point 3, with the default theme active, does deactivating every other plugin except Co-Authors Plus and repeating the flow still reproduce the bug?

Quick Edit will continue to work as a reliable workaround in the meantime.

Thanks, that narrows it down considerably. If switching to Twenty Twenty-Five didn’t fix it, the conflict is on the plugin side rather than the theme side. Three things would help, and none of them require deactivating anything on your live site:

1. The list of active plugins. You can grab it from Plugins → Installed Plugins, or, if you have WP-CLI access, wp plugin list --status=active --field=name. With that I can check whether anything obvious filters the REST author lookup or post-save flow.
2. Whether the site uses a persistent object cache. Redis, Memcached, or any caching plugin in that category. You can check from Tools → Site Health → Info → Constants, or via WP-CLI with wp eval 'echo wp_using_ext_object_cache() ? "yes" : "no";'. This matters because the post_author re-sync happens immediately before the REST response is sent, and certain object caches can serve a stale get_post()to the code that does the sync.
3. If you have access to a staging copy, or a tool like the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin’s Troubleshooting Mode, you can deactivate other plugins only for your own admin session without affecting other visitors at all. That would let you run the bisect safely on production. Activating Troubleshooting Mode → disable all plugins → reactivate Co-Authors Plus only → repeat the publish flow. If that fixes it, you can then re-enable plugins one by one in the same Troubleshooting session to find the culprit.

Quick Edit remains a safe workaround in the meantime.