This problem has happened to both my wordpress blogs hosted with trap17. I made some posts and assign them to different categories but a few days later, the categories disappear and all my posts are automatically placed in the Uncategorized category instead. I believe this is not a unique problem because I've seen some info about this on the wordpress support website. However, there doesn't seem to be a single solution to it. I've tried repairing my database but it doesn't help. I've got the latest version of wordpress. Anybody got any suggestions? Thanks in advance for your help.

did you happen to change the template/theme for your wordpress-powered blog, or heavily edited it? if it's just the displaying of the categories which is the problem, the theme you're using could not have the proper php code to call them, or you have mistakenly removed them while editing. solution is to bring that code back into your php file/s.

if the categories you have created are lost within the database themselves, i cannot seem to fathom with certainty why that happened. there could be a malicious plugin you could be using which rendered the categories to revert back to the uncategorized "category". although that is highly unlikely of course, but not impossible. maybe try disabling your plugins in the meantime, recreate your categories, then reenabling your plugins one by one, and see how it goes.

another possibility is that you may have inadvertently dropped the tables for your categories within the phpmyadmin, if you have been using it lately. tell us of your progress on resolving this.

Thanks for your reply! No, I really haven't done anything to it. I have no activated plugins. It just happens all of a sudden. Actually I notice it's been an ongoing issue with wordpress from what I see in their support forums. If I remember correctly, it has happened eversince I updated to 2.5+.

I've just checked my wordpress sites and the categories are showing up again. It's an on and off problem though. Sometimes the categories are there and sometimes they aren't. But it still affects me cos' when it happens, I can't put my new posts in the right categories, and my visitors won't be able to access various posts via category too

Perhaps you should try updating to 2.6? This only occured once to me, after that every blog post stayed into its category.

Update and keep us informed, will ya?

A look at its category tables in PhpMyAdmin revealed tables
are configured differently from WP 2.5.1. There is also
NO WAY TO IMPORT previous sql tables unless you re-code
everything by hand.

I can't give any concrete reason to such a behaviour until
I apply for hosting and get mine up and working. Meanwhile
I am tracking this thread so I can post updates later.

Have a look at wordpress.org and see if you find news
with regards to this problem.

Yes, I have the same problem with disappearing categories of Wordpress. This is connected to phpMyAdmin falling down and not working, and that has happened 6 times for the ~3 weeks I'm hosted here, 'cmmon guys what's so wrong with your servers, phpmyadmin is almost 30% of the time not working and Wordpress's plugins are connected to the mySQL database and when it's not working, they're not working properly either (I can't upload content, I can't auto-upgrade plugins, some plugins don't work, categories dissappear if they have been edited during the downtime of phpmyadmin and they come back after it's fixed). At me, phpMyAdmin is down from yesterday, I submitted a ticket but it still isn't resolved and I am very nerved because of that, I want my site to work at least 90% of the time as it should, I'm facing problems a lot of time I have been here, and I don't know why there are so much problems which disappear and reappear the next day or 2 days after they have been fixed.
If phpMyAdmin continues to have such downtime I promise I will find a better host.

Yours truthfully,

Miladin