Links not showing in Manage links

I have the free version of BetterLinks installed. Would love to purchase, but on the fence because of this. I can add links, those work. After a few seconds when I return to the Manage Links page, the links I made are gone. They still work. Categories are also not displayed. They still exist, because I can’t add another category with the same name. Tags seem to stay visible, and do have a link count with them. So the links are there, but they don’t show up. This topic was modified 10 months, 2 weeks ago by gaveguido . Hello @gaveguido Thanks for reaching out and for your interest in upgrading—really appreciate that! From what you described, it sounds like the links and categories are still present in the system but just not showing up properly in the Manage Links interface. That usually points to a database inconsistency. Just to confirm—at any point, did you happen to remove the BetterLinks plugin and also delete its related database tables? Sometimes during cleanup or reinstallation, critical tables might get removed, which causes the interface to behave exactly like this: links work on the front end but vanish from the dashboard. To fix this, you can manually recreate the missing database structure. We’ve prepared a quick walkthrough you can follow here: https://d.pr/v/qBVCne Also, to make sure the table is fully up to date, please run this SQL command in your site’s database (you can use phpMyAdmin or a similar tool): ALTER TABLE YourPrefix_betterlinks ADD COLUMN uncloaked VARCHAR(10) DEFAULT ' '; Just replace YourPrefix_ with the actual prefix used in your database (commonly wp_ , unless it’s been customized). Let me know once you’ve tried that—or if you’re unsure at any step, I’d be happy to help walk you through it. Looking forward to getting this sorted for you! Best regards, Pial Hi Pial, As far as I know, I had this from first install. I didn’t remove the plugin and/or deleted the tables. I checked the database and found only a few tables; The table betterlinks doesn’t exist at all. I tried installing the plugin again, but that didn’t help. Any suggestions? Drop all tables and reinstall maybe? Thanks for your help. Cheers, Guido Hi Guido, Thanks for checking—yep, if the betterlinks table isn’t there at all, that would explain why things aren’t showing up correctly. Here’s what I recommend: 1. First, export your existing links (if you’ve added quite a few and want to keep them). You can do that from the BetterLinks → Tools → Export tab. If you don’t have many links or don’t mind recreating them, you can skip this step. 2. Then: Deactivate and delete the BetterLinks plugin from your dashboard. Go into your database and delete any remaining tables that include _betterlinks in the name. After that, reinstall the plugin fresh from the WordPress repository. This will ensure the plugin sets up all necessary tables properly during installation. Let me know how it goes or if you run into anything along the way—I’m here to help! Cheers, Pial Hi Pial, After reinstalling like you said, there were no betterlinks tables in the database at all. I opened the plugin page and it gave me a Bad Gateway error. Refreshing loaded the plugin page, and only added the three tables to the database I had before (meta, terms and terms_relationships). Adding cats, tags and links work, I never had the cats show up before, now they do. But when I go to another backend page and then return to Manage Links, all is empty again. Not sure how this is possible. Cheers, Guido Hi Guido, Thanks for the update. Before we move to manual fixes, let’s try one more clean reset to rule out any hidden conflict or activation issue: 1. Enable Debug Logging In your wp-config.php file, please add (or update) the following lines: define('WP_DEBUG', true); define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true); define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false); This will log any errors to a file located at /wp-content/debug.log , without showing them to visitors. It should help us catch anything failing silently during plugin activation. 2. Temporarily deactivate all other plugins Just to ensure nothing else is interfering with BetterLinks during install. 3. Delete all BetterLinks-related tables From your database, remove any tables that contain _betterlinks in the name. 4. Reinstall BetterLinks Now reinstall it. Once that’s done, check if the main betterlinks table gets created and whether everything works as expected. If things still don’t work, please share the contents of the debug.log file—I’ll help analyze it and guide you from there. Looking forward to your update! Cheers, Pial Hi Pial, I think I found it. It probably has something to do with the database version. I need to upgrade the server anyways, so I’ll try BetterLinks after I did that. Thanks for all your help. Cheers, Guido