I wanted to chime in with a “me too” post. What I’ve tried so far (with no success):
– Modification of the user meta to a:1:{….
– Replacement of wp-includes/wp-admin
– Deactivation of all plugins
– Repair of the database itself
– Creation of new admin user, deletion of previous admin users, and then recreation
None of these attempts corrected the problem. For some reason, I’m not sure why, the site just began showing ALL users, regardless of assigned permissions a “Submit for Review” button rather than “Publish”.
An attempt to save a page/post with “Submit for Review” results in it not actually getting written to the database – so the content is essentially lost.
Also, though there are already existing posts in the wp-posts table, if you view “Posts” in the admin, it will tell you “No Posts Found”.
I am just about to completely destroy the site and try to restore from backup, as I’m seemingly out of other options – but given that I’ve no idea what caused this problem, nor how to prevent it again, I’m obviously not thrilled about this proposed solution (nor are my users).