I would love a “read”/”unread”/”new posts” kinda plugin for bbpress (2.x) 
That would indeed be a very useful plugin!
Do you have any idea how you would go about building that? Off the top of my head, the only ways I can think of would be horridly inefficient and slow.
The only forum software I’ve seen do this correctly is SMF. Even phpBB and vBulletin both have crappy implementations of this functionality which don’t work very well. The SMF system is flawless and works perfectly everytime. Something similar for bbPress would be awesome.
yes a unread/new post plugin was great.
a avatar plugin for profile edit was also nice.
you can integrate a existing one for wordpress into bbpress profile or so?!
I don’t know a smart and efficient way, first thing that comes to mind is a table that has unread (or read) posts for every (logged_in) user. But yeah, that probably will be slow, and grow quickly?
Maybe JJJ has some ideas on that? I know it has been mentioned before in these forums.
As for the avatar plugin, Buddypress does this pretty well and I’m sure there are other plugins out there that do the trick.
New tables are usually a bad option. That sort of data is usually much better off stored elsewhere. It’s not too bad in a single site install, but it really screws the pooch when you move to a multisite install and you have custom tables flying all over the place making a mess.
You’re probably right, I never developed a plugin for WordPress yet, something I like to look into when I have some time again 
Most people seem to be moving towards using custom post-types for storing large chunks of data these days. But this data is person specific, so it might best stored as meta data connected to the users profile. I’m not sure exactly where that would be stored though.
That meta data could quite big too as you would need to store whether someone had looked at a LOT of posts in some situations. I guess you could make it conk out past a certain date though to stop the system overloading itself, or perhaps cap the meta data at a certain number of bytes perhaps …. hmmmm, maybe it is possible.
Not sure I have the time to delve into this sort of thing myself though, and since they’re new to this stuff I need to be able to hand hold them through a lot of it. If there’s an experienced bbPress coder out there willing to help, feel free to volunteer A helping hand from across the other side of the world could be a useful experience for them. Collaborating with people in other parts of the world could be a useful learning experience for them.
What about a plugin to add in forum signatures?
a avatar plugin for profile edit was also nice.
you can integrate a existing one for wordpress into bbpress profile or so?!
Do you know of any good existing ones for WordPress?
You’re probably right about it being a bridge too far for this project, but since you asked what kinda plugins people would like to see, well.. That one for sure
There’s a forum signature one already:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbp-signature/
As for an avatar plugin:
BuddyPress as mentioned and I’ve seen some others been mentioned in these forums too, but I didn’t test those.
There’s also an UBBcode/toolbar plugin but that’s about it I think.
i dont will use buddypress for avatar.
this one:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-local-avatar/
when you can integrate this into the profile of bbpress i like it
Thanks for the forum signature plugin link. I didn’t see that in the bbPress plugin repo. (maybe it’s not there?).
The BuddyPress avatar plugin seems like a good option for providing bbPress avatar support.
The bbPress plugin repo on this site is for the standalone edition (1.x), but current development (it’s at RC2 at the moment) is focused on the WordPress plugin edition (2.x).
I’ve thought about unread posts. The easiest way to do it is to update either a user-meta value or a cookie when each user visits the site. Hook into the topic class function and add a special class to topics with unread replies in them since the last time you visited the site. When a user visits a topic with a last active time after the users last activity time, add those topic ID’s to the meta/cookie so they can be excluded as needed.
Using a cookie is easiest, but inconsistent across devices for the same user (iPhone/iPad/Computer all show mixed results.) Doing a ‘persistent’ unread posts adaptation would require a huge amount of overhead, and probably isn’t really feasible without logging the user ID’s that have visited each topic-reply in post-meta. On busy forums with many users, this would be a huge headache.
Using a cookie seems to be the approach used by vBulletin, and it’s pretty horrid as it doesn’t carry over between browsers.
IMO storing the users data per post would be too resource intensive with too many users. Storing the post data per user would be too resource intensive for users who didn’t visit often.
SMF seems to handle it fine. Not sure how they do it though.
I think I’ll avoid suggesting unread posts as an option for them. There’s way too many pitfalls I can see in implementing this. Best if someone with more knowledge tackles it I think or we’ll just end up with a horridly inefficient approach to a complex problem.
It looks like they’ll be building an application for a weather station that will tie in with a WordPress powered website I run.
