Vim syntastic error messages always hidden

Question

Syntastic does not seem to work properly for me. It is installed, :SyntasticInfo says everything is fine (active mode enabled, filetype cpp, checker is ycm). At first glance everything seems to be fine because it looks like this:

I have my signs on the left and the location list at the bottom. But as soon as I move the cursor, the signs as well as the loc-list disappear and it looks like that:

The only exception to this rule being entering insert mode right at startup. But of course once I leave it, everything disappears.

Now I know that there are commands like :SyntasticCheck or :Errors and they do exactly... nothing. I type them, I execute them and that's it. Like I hadn't done anything at all. Naturally saving the file doesn't yield any result either.

My .vimrc looks like this:

let g:syntastic_enable_signs = 1
let g:syntastic_auto_loc_list=1
let g:syntastic_check_on_open = 1
let g:syntastic_cpp_compiler_options = ' -std=c++11 -Wall'

If I remove these lines I don't even have the signs and loc-list on startup. So yea, I am really at a loss here.

Answer 1

Turns out this was more of a YouCompleteMe problem than it was Syntastic. YCM automatically sets itself as the checker for syntastic (for compatible languages) and also requires a .ycm_extra_conf.py which should contain the compile flags for the ycm compiler. Without these flags it is not capable of compiling the code or detecting any errors.