Troubleshooting

Start here

No invitation email arrives

First, establish which of the two things has gone wrong. Open the Tracking tab:

• The row is there, Pending. The invitation was created and the plugin handed the email to WordPress. The problem is delivery.
• No row at all, and you saw a warning when sending. Read the warning: the address was invalid, or it already has an account.

For a delivery problem, in order:

1. Check the junk folder. Obvious, and right roughly half the time.
2. Install an SMTP plugin and point it at a real mailbox. WordPress sends through PHP by default. A great many hosts either block that outright or send it from an address that no receiving server trusts, and it goes to spam or nowhere. This is the fix for every email your site sends, not just these.
3. Check your From address is on your own domain. Putting a Gmail or Outlook address in the From field, while your web server does the sending, is the most reliable way to be marked as spam. Receiving servers check whether the sender is authorised for that domain, and free mailbox providers never authorise your host.
4. Meanwhile, use Copy link. Every pending invitation on the Tracking tab hands you the real URL. Send it however you like. Nothing is lost while you sort the email out.

A used link still shows the registration form

This is a page cache serving a copy of the registration page saved before the invitation was accepted. The link is genuinely dead: submitting the form would be refused. What you are looking at is an old photograph of the page.

The plugin already tells caches not to store this page four different ways, which covers virtually every host and caching plugin. If yours ignores all of them, it is a platform cache that overwrites the origin's instructions, and it needs telling directly:

1. Find your host's or caching plugin's cache exclusion list.
2. Add the registration page's path, for example /portal-setup/.
3. Purge the cache once.

On 20i, that is StackCache > Cache Exclusions. WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache and WP Super Cache all have an equivalent, usually called "never cache these pages".

People register but are not logged in, or land somewhere unexpected

Check Log people in automatically once they finish registering under Settings > Behaviour, and the destination under Settings > Pages.

If both are right and it still fails, this used to be a real conflict: on sites where the theme or a page builder sends output early, the login cookie and the redirect could not be set, and the browser was left on the registration page with a "headers already sent" warning in the log. Elementor's image-loading module was the known case. Version 1.0.38 processes the registration before the page renders, which removes that entire class of conflict. If you are seeing this, update the plugin first.

Everybody gets Subscriber, whatever role I chose

The role is checked again at the moment the account is created, and if it no longer qualifies as low-privilege it falls back to your default role, and then to Subscriber. That is the safety net doing its job.

It usually means a plugin update gave that role a new capability, most often upload_files or edit_posts, after you sent the invitation. Check the role in a role editor. Roles and security lists what disqualifies a role.

The role I want is not in the list

It holds a capability that lets it edit content or manage the site. Invite as Subscriber and promote the account under Users afterwards, which is the intended route. See Roles and security.

Tracking shows Accepted for an address with no account

Deleting a WordPress user now clears their accepted invitation record, so this cannot happen from 1.0.34 onwards. A row left over from before that can simply be deleted.

The reverse case is deliberate: deleting a user leaves any pending invitation for that address alone, because with the account gone that link is live again, which is what you would want.

Someone shows the wrong role in Tracking

The Role column shows the account's live role where an account exists, not the role the invitation was stamped with. If you promoted somebody after they registered, the column showing their new role is correct and the invitation is simply history.

The Invite tab shows "One thing to finish setup"

Either no published page is selected as the registration page, or the selected page does not contain [banginvites_form].

The check reads the page's stored content, so a page assembled entirely inside a builder's own data may not be recognised even when the form is genuinely there. If you are confident it is, send yourself an invitation on an address with no account and see what happens. If the form appears, ignore the notice.

The invitation-only notice appears when it should not

You are seeing the page as a visitor, without a valid link. Anyone who can create users is let through, so if you are logged in as an administrator and still seeing it, you are probably in a private window or logged out in that browser.

If real invited people are seeing it while holding a valid link, check that the link still has both its parameters. Some email clients and link-tracking services rewrite URLs and can drop or mangle query strings.

The welcome email did not arrive but the invitation did

Check Send a welcome email is on at the top of the Welcome email tab. If you are using another registration plugin, check you did not turn it off deliberately to stop the two doubling up.

Note that the welcome email is sent to the person, and the team notification to the addresses in Alert these addresses on each new registration. Those are two separate things and an empty notify field is not a fault.

Nothing here matches

Write to me. Tell me what you expected, what happened instead, and what the Tracking tab says about the invitation involved. That last one narrows it down faster than anything else.