The forum participant role is only set for situations where you have a multi site install, and a global forum where users not explicitly part of that site are allowed to post. Basically, it mirrors the subscriber capabilities, and avoids having random users assigned as the default role for that site, which might be more capable than you want.
Can you explain a little bit more about your installation? Private/hidden forums, theme, etc?
Hi,
Thanks John.
Yes doing three private forums on a single website WP installation.
I’d like to create users who can pretty much only access (and post to) the forums as a part of their user privileges.
How would you tackle this?
Thanks again. 
Drew
Hi again,
…Am I overcomplicating this? Should I just make the default new user a “subscriber”?
Thanks.
EDIT: Subscriber doesn’t seem to work.
You should be able to make a new role and only add the bbpress capabilities to it. Try something like jason tadlocks “members” plugin if you want to use a plugin to do this.
I am using a great plugin called “WordPress Access Control” right now and I really like it.
I don’t understand how to assign any particular role to being able to use the forum.
The instructions from this page seem to be outdated:
https://bbpress.org/documentation/integration-with-wordpress/
“In the “WordPress Integration” section of the “Settings” area in your bbPress admin you will find a “User Role Map” where you can set which roles will be applied to users who register on your forums. Users who register on your WordPress blog will have the appropriate role applied to their account when they first login to bbPress.”
I didn’t notice any “User Role Map”, but I could be easily mistaken.
How are these things handled in the current version of bbpress?
This seems like a pretty fundamental thing(?)
I don’t think you fully understand what roles and capabilities are. Furthermore, did you try the plugin I suggested? It’s quite different from the “WordPress Access Control” plugin which doesn’t provide you with the ability to modify the capabilities different roles have. The documentation is indeed outdated since the way people register has changed in bbpress 2.x.. The same functionality that the user role map appears to have had (I never used bbpress before 2.x), can now be found under General > Settings > New user default role.
Hi Zofar,
Thanks for your guidance.
I was hoping to be able to set this without the use of another plugin, but I will use both for now.
…Until the documentation is updated this (hopefully) will be a working solution!
Best Regards,
Drew
Hey to Zofar and others,
Just wanted to let you know that using the members plugin is working out great. That alone would be a useful addition to the documentation!
Of course that would require a dependence on another plugin, but it’s an option.
Thanks again. Got it working.
BTW when you are looking for this plugin https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members/
Installed it, but still doesn’t work for me. As admin I have created Topics in the forum and as a Forum Participant I get “Oh bother! No topics were found here!” and do not see any topics.
Hey Erno,
Keep playing around with the roles in Members… I eventually got it to work after selecting enough privileges for the user role.
Which privileges did you select?
I have a similar problem. I cannot view the forums with any user role other than “Administrator”. I even tested with the Memebers plugin and gave the role “forum participant” rights to eveything in WP, more than the Administrator, and stil I cannot see the forum.
http://rebeccapersson.com/klub-sunde-born-forum/
All forums and topics are public and open.
What could be blocking this?
Cheers
Vayu
Hi, any way to ask that this thread be deleted or edited?
I’m getting some 404s on my website because of my link to an image file that no longer exists; would like to edit my entries or delete the thread altogether
Maybe I can edit this myself… couldn’t figure out how
Thanks 🙂
