Fixing Juser: :_load: Unable to load user with ID:

When you open an article, in Joomla, you might see an error message saying the following:

Juser: :_load: Unable to load user with ID:

Wow. That sounds bad. However, the reality is that it’s not a that big of a deal.

What the error is trying to tell you, is that it can’t find the user account of the person who created the article. As a result it can’t load his or her information to display. How much of a problem is this? It’s not really a big deal at all. I have happily ignored this error on some sites for literally years.

What if you want to get rid of the error, though? You can easily do this. There are two methods to achieve this:

  • Changing the author in the article
  • Changing the author ID using MySQL

The first method is arguably the simplest, but if you need to to this for a lot of articles the second method will be a lot faster. Using the second method does require access to your database and is a more advanced solution.

Changing the author in Joomla

To make the change in Joomla, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Open the article you get the error for. You can easily recognize them as they’ll display no author name in the overview!

2. Click the “Publishing” tab

3. Go to “Created by” and click the blue icon.

4. Choose any user you want to “replace” the missing author with

5. Save the article

Using MySQL (and PHPMyAdmin)

If you are going down the MySQL route, you need to be a little bit more of an advanced user. I am going to intentionally gloss over the fact how you can specifically get access to your MySQL database / PHPMyAdmin because you either know how to get there, or have no business attempting to follow these instructions!

  1. Make a note of the ID that’s mentioned in the article with the error
  2. Go to your Joomla users and make note of the user ID of the user you want to use as the “new” author.
  3. Connect to your MySQL database or use PHPMyadmin
  4. Run the command below
UPDATE `(yourtbl)_content` SET `created_by` = 'newid' WHERE `txsc8_content`.`id` = oldid;

Of course, you will want to replace the values for newid and oldid with your own numeric values and make sure you’re updating your own _content table. Please dont’ just copy and paste this command and then complain that it doesn’t work – it’s not supposed to work without you updating it!

Using the command above you can update as many authors as your heart desires. After applying the change it will be immediately reflected by Joomla, because Joomla is cool like that. And more importantly, you won’t be seeing that error again.

Discover more from PowerUser Guide

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading