Why Are User Roles Missing or Not Showing in User Role Editor?

If you've noticed that user roles are mysteriously missing from dropdowns, checkboxes, or the User Role Editor interface, you're not alone. This is a common point of confusion that can have several different causes. This guide will walk you through the most frequent reasons and how to resolve them.

Common Reasons for Missing Roles

Based on community reports and troubleshooting, here are the typical culprits:

• Plugin or Theme Conflicts: A recent update to another plugin or your theme can interfere with how User Role Editor functions.
• Primary Role Exclusion: The 'Other Roles' section on a user's profile will not show the user's own primary role. This is by design to prevent confusion.
• Roles Assigned to Users: The 'Delete Role' dropdown will only show roles that are not currently assigned to any user.
• WooCommerce Compatibility: A specific update to WooCommerce (version 3.4.6) was known to cause a conflict that hid roles from the User Role Editor dropdown.
• JavaScript Errors: Console errors can prevent the interface from loading correctly, leaving dropdowns empty.

How to Troubleshoot and Fix the Issue

Follow these steps to diagnose and solve the problem.

1. Perform a Conflict Test

This is the most critical first step. Temporarily deactivate all other plugins except User Role Editor and switch to a default WordPress theme (like Twenty Twenty-Four). If the roles reappear, you know a conflict exists. Reactivate your plugins one by one to identify which one is causing the issue.

2. Check the User's Primary Role

If a specific role is missing from the "Other Roles" box when editing a user, check what their primary role is. User Role Editor intentionally excludes a user's primary role from the "Other Roles" list to avoid redundancy. For example, a user with a primary role of "Teacher" will not see "Teacher" in their "Other Roles" options.

3. Check Role Assignment for Deletion

If you cannot see a role in the "Delete Role" dropdown, it is because that role is still assigned to one or more users. You must change or remove that role from all users before it will become available for deletion.

4. Check for JavaScript Errors

Open your browser's developer console (usually F12) and look for any red error messages. Errors mentioning ure.js or getElementById() indicate a script conflict. The conflict test in Step 1 will usually resolve this.

5. Investigate Known WooCommerce Conflict

If you use WooCommerce and roles disappeared after an update, this was a known conflict. Check the version history of your plugins. The User Role Editor team provided a code snippet workaround for this issue. You may need to search for the specific details of that fix if the problem persists.

Understanding How WordPress Stores Roles

It's helpful to know that WordPress stores all of a user's roles—both primary and additional—in a single database field named wp_capabilities (the wp_ prefix may be different on your site). The first role in this serialized array is considered the user's primary role. When using code like $user->roles, you should get an array of all roles a user has. If you are only seeing one, it could be because the other roles were granted by a plugin that creates them dynamically and may not have loaded when your code executed.

By methodically working through these potential causes, you should be able to restore visibility to your user roles and get back to managing your site's permissions.