I had this case that posts couldn’t get sticky after I check them to be sticky. Saving the changes says they are sticky, but when reloading the page, this turns out to be a big fat lie. Trying to remove “stickiness” from other posts wasn’t working either.

Probably I must mention that this is a large WordPress site on a dedicated server, without a dedicated system administrator. Having in mind I didn’t change anything in the system, it was kind of obvious that something must be wrong with the environment. Optimizing the DB with “Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions” gave the output that wp_options table has crashed and automatic repair couldn’t fix it.

Following is the list of the commands I used to login to the server and repair it:

Actually the issue could be seen in /var/log/syslog as some error messages from the automatic repair attempts. Just have this in mind.