BBPress: No Support in the Forums
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Sorry you feel that way.
I spend at least an hour a day answering every question in the forum that I am able to. There are other people that do their best to help out as well.
Bottom line is we simply need more people who have the time to spend a few minutes a day in here to help out other users. This forum is run exclusively by volunteers only, so we all do what we can.
Documentation is limited. A lot of information found, is pointing to the old version of bbPress.
Fact is:
– There is limited documentation about where to start (other than installing bbPress)
– There is limited documentation about how to enable theme support
– When you run into problems, you are on your own.
Somebody at Automattic should decide that some people should work dedicated on bbPress and bbPress only, otherwise nothing will change.
My 2 cents…
bbPress isn’t only an Automattic project, anyone is free to contribute their time towards improving any of the things mentioned above.
I know. I would love to contribute to bbPress. But for a beginner with bbPress it is difficult to find where to start. A bbPress Codex with bbPress specific features would be welcome. But for a start a good documentation would be most helpfull.
It’s one of those critical mass things, if you ask me.
I chose bbPress over others but was most frustrated when I discovered it’s theming integration issues. Thankfully Anointed came to my rescue.
The other issue of annoyance is the way it treats comments as a post-type which, to me anyway, removes it from being integrated with other services like IntenseDebate and Akismet – and obviously Spam is a real issue for forum operators.
I’m getting up to speed anyway and hope to help out where I can however most people’s challenges seem to be around theming problems and functionality limitations, not to mention lack of help that is split across to different websites.
On a final note, thank you indeed for the work on bbPress and everyone’s efforts. I’m sure it’ll get there.
bbPress does not use comments in any fashion. Rather bbPress uses custom post-types for topics and replies with some rather special crazy code to relate them together.
That is actually where the real magic comes in. Because bbPress uses standard post-types and taxonomies it means integrating with many other plugins is much simpler. Now that still leaves it up to the plugin authors to add support for bbPress. I can say that JJ took every possible step to make integrating with these plugins as simple and standard as possible.
Creating a custom theme is not as easy as I would have hoped for, but after time you get the hang of it. The only reason I have not personally written a ‘how-to-theme’ guide is because I still have a few remaining questions myself. You have seen firsthand though, that even someone with my little knowledge of coding can create a 100% custom theme capable of doing anything I want it to.
The best way to help out, is to simply jump in and answer any questions you can. I do the same, if I know the answer, I answer, if I don’t I skip the question (probably makes people feel ignored, but better than to have me just say I don’t know)
I agree with the above. bbPress has a lot of potential to be the “forum with plugins” except it needs to have attracted enough flies to create those plugins. JJ, would like to be involved but I think I’m spending a lot of time trying to get the basics up. I think that the point is well made – Automattic needs to decide if it wants to kick start this project and provide a bit more help to you to get the basics done that attract others.
The forum space is very hot, including q and a. IF there ever was a time, it’s now to make that decision or you’ll see others steal your thunder as integrated solutions. This would work well for them since it won’t look like a programmers tool, which it feels like more than an simpler plugin solution.
On the comments conversation, by not standardizing to use WP comments and weaving off to use a custom post type, how do you think that leaves bbPress to counter to huge problem of Spam though?
Seems this alienates bbPress to utilize another great Automattic tool, IntenseDebate which I find an absolute godsend.
Sorry for delays in answering, been without power/internet for a week now. Sitting in coffee shop to try and help answer questions here.
To answer your question:
bbPress does come with support for Akismet built into the newer vs. This will give the same protection that comments presently have. Akismet alone, is imo pretty much useless though.
I would also consider installing other plugins such as honeypots (traps that only bots fill out), moderation plugins, and there are also a ton of tricks you can add to your htaccess file that will also help a bit. I don’t have a list of everything I use as it’s on a home computer but will post a list whenever I can.
The biggest problem we are fighting right now is with actual people spamming the forums and not bots. That is pretty much impossible to stop and requires a lot of tedious work by the forum moderators to keep things clean.
As to IntenseDebate:
Well to each his own on that one. I personally don’t like anyone else having access to my comments, even if it is just to help stop the spam. Same reason I personally don’t run Akismet.
Finally keep in mind that custom post types (topics/replies) are simply just data in the db. It is entirelly possible to build plugins like IntenseDebate to work with bbPress should you so choose to. It all comes down to a matter of demand as to whether the actual companies will write a custom plugin for bbPress, or whether or not you actaully pay to have it built yourself.
I recently installed bbPress and found spam within 30 minutes. Akismet stops nothing that I can see. I set bbPress up so one had to register. That did not stop the spammers (advertisements for knockoffs). I did install the moderation plugins, but still no solution.
Right now I have Forums deactivated until I here there is any type of solution.
Physlab
seems like spam is coming from non registered users, perhaps the best way to stop spam from coming in is to add re-captcha or something to the post box.
If you only allow registered users to post then you could add captcha or something to the registration page.
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troy222
@troy222
12 years, 10 months ago
This plugin obviously has problems and a lack of support by WordPress. It’s just an entire list of not resolved bugs that have been reported. I’m looking for alternatives.