[artkahlich]

Last night I took a look at and managed to correct the 2 topic threads where threading was not working. In these 2 threads, I went into the administrator dashboard, then to “All Replies”. I looked at each reply to the thread in the edit screen. What I found were 2 different symptoms causing the failures.

In one case, a reply (say #306) that was being replied to did not have a permalink ending in “/reply/306/” – instead it had a permalink the same as the topic. When I updated the permalink to end with the reply number, went back to the thread and refreshed the browser, threading indents were working.

In the other case, a reply (say #396) had the correct permalink, but in the “Reply Attributes” its “Reply To” attribute was also 396 – it somehow was a reply to itself. When I corrected that, went back to the thread and refreshed the browser, threading indents were working.

There were also some places where it was obvious that moderators and contributors were doing replies to each other’s replies with no threading, but here the permalinks were correct and the “Reply To” attribute was 0, so I am going to say for now that they did not use the REPLY link on the comment they were replying to, but did a reply to topic instead.

[artkahlich]

Also, I checked the Settings->Forums “Reply Threading” box, and set the “Enable threaded (nested) replies 5 levels deep”.

[artkahlich]

Here is my setup info:
Wordpress: 3.8
bbPress: 2.5.2
OS is Linux, Fedora 11
PHP is 5.2.13
Apache is 2.2.15

Theme is a copy of TwentyFourteen with light modifications to margins, colors, fonts and font sizes only. No php mods at all.
bbPress Plugins are “bbPress Admin Bar”, “bbPress Notify (no spam)”, “Global Hide/Remove Admin Bar Plugin”
Wordpress plugins are “bbPress”, “Bad Behavior”, “Akismet” and “Mailchimp”.

I get the same ordering issues with only some of the Topic threads.

I also have a particular thread where a reply to a reply does not show any thread indentation and ends up after all comments on the topic, just as if it had been a reply to topic.

Finally, at least in the TwentyFourteen theme I have some complaints:

1. The legend of bbp-form gives no indication of the difference between a reply to topic versus a reply to a reply. I have to look at the URL displayed by the browser to tell the difference.

2. When I go to the link of a post given by the RSS feed, it displays starting below the post’s toolbar. Now I know there is a toolbar above the post and can scroll up to click the REPLY link, then go reply. BUT – I really, really don’t want to have to educate every one of my moderators and users about this. From some Google searching about this, it seems that having the post’s reply link above the post is a more recent feature. I don’t think it is very intuitive, especially when a post link ending in “…/#post-416” gets me to post 416 with the toolbar for that post invisible until you scroll up to see it (if you knew to do that).

3. Some of my moderators have pointed out to me examples of the “Freshness” column in the Forum index pages being just plain wrong. To be more specific, the “Freshness” entries in question say a particular category is several days old (even after an F5 browser refresh), when by going down to a topic in that category you can see that it should have been 30 minutes old.

[artkahlich]

Regarding the current Forum subscriptions:
1. Do they apply only to the current forum, or to sub-forums as well? I am seeing behavior that a subscription to a forum does ”’not”’ subscribe you to all sub-forums as well. Will I and all my moderators have to go and subscribe to each sub-forum in the entire forum tree?
2. Do they apply only to new topics? Or to ask another way, do they also apply to all of a forum’s existing topic replies? Here again, I am seeing behavior that leads me to believe that I will only get a single new topic notification, but I will have to go and ”’manually subscribe”’ to each individual topic if I want to see replies to that topic. For administrators and moderators this would be nastily inconvenient behavior.

The wording at https://codex.bbpress.org/forum-settings/ for precisely what subscriptions do appears ambiguous to me in these areas.

Even though RSS for the entire forum is currently implemented, I still have a great interest in a simple email subscription that is equivalent. Simply put, the reason is simplicity for my users, moderators, etc., as well as for me as an administrator/implementer. While I can setup something using the RSS feed that would generate email notifications to all my moderators, I don’t want to for a variety of reasons including time to implement and potential security holes.

A thought: you may decide to implement both “forum local” and “forum with sub-forums” subscriptions. When unsubscribed, the links would display as:
”’Subscribe”’ – if there are no sub-forums
”’Subscribe with sub-forums”’ – if there are sub-forums (the default)
”’Subscribe without sub-forums”’ – if there are sub-forums (user selectable)
where the ”’without sub-forums”’ versus ”’with sub-forums”’ are 2 faces of a toggle link (similar to your Subscribe/Unsubscribe toggle link) controlling what the ”’Subscribe”’ link in fact subscribes the user to.

If you choose to implement only a single behavior for forum subscriptions, I am ”’strongly”’ in favor of including all sub-forum new topics and replies. I can see every bbPress site administrator and forum moderator wanting this functionality.

I also think it extremely counter intuitive to not include existing topic replies in a forum subscription. I hope you do already, but I have not experimented with it enough to know precisely how the forum subscriptions behave.

NB: The “unsubscribe” bug may have clouded my observations of real forum subscription behavior.

[artkahlich]

The short answer is: no difference.

I think I get what you are asking… I did the following:

cd wp-content/themes/copyOf2014
sudo cp page.php bbpress.php

That did not affect behavior on my desktop browser, which continues to render properly. Neither did it change anything on my Android Chrome browser, which still shows a mostly blank page with only the single word “Forums” when I go to “http://mysite.com/forums/”.

I have – as recommended – copied the twentyfourteen theme so that I could make font and margin adjustments, as well as changing the top and side bars from black to very light gray with black text. That “copyOf2014” also contains – again I believe as recommended – a copied “bbpress” sub-directory with a lot of php files and a copied “css” sub-directory with “bbpress.css” among other .css files.

[artkahlich]

I see the issue covered in ticket 2493 as clouding the issue here – it certainly did for me. You post a new topic or reply, don’t check the “Notify me…” check box at the bottom – because you are already subscribed – get unsubscribed because you didn’t check the box and get no email notifications from that point onward! I am using WordPress 3.8 with bbPress 2.5.2.

I would like a ”’Subscribe”’ link on the ”’Forums”’ page that gives me or any other registered forum user an email for both new topics and replies for any and all forum (including sub-forum) activity. Intuitive behavior for top level forum ”’Subscribe”’ is getting an email for ”’any”’ non-spam activity for that forum and all its sub-forums, if any. I deem anything else (ie, leaving out the sub-forums) as extremely counter-intuitive, even though some people may want that some of the time.

RSS is either unknown, too much trouble, or potentially going away for my forum users who want notifications. I would also greatly prefer these emails to be sourced ”’after”’ the “Bad Behavior” and “Akismet” plugins have deemed the posting to ”’not”’ be spam.

Right now I could hack something together for the top level, likely using the “bbpress email notifications” 0.3 plugin to generate email to a mailman distribution that my forum users could subscribe to. But it would be such an ugly hack and a nuisance to maintain. Setting it up so a spammer couldn’t do evil things with it would also be a pain.

[artkahlich]

I have filed this as a bbPress defect:

https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2504

[artkahlich]

So let me restate what you found to work:

1. When creating a menu item for forums, do NOT use the automatically available permalink that ends in “/forums/”
2. Instead, create a page that has the shortcode [bbp-forum-index] in the body. There could also then be other content or links in the body.
3. Make sure the page you created does NOT have a permalink that ends in “/forums/”. In my case I had a page Title of “Forums”, but I changed the permalink to end with “/allforums/”.

I did this on my site and it now works on my Android smart phone.

This weirdness needs to be either fixed or on the bbPress FAQ.

[artkahlich]

I have observed precisely the same problem on my Android Motorola Droid HD Maxx. In my case I defined a page containing the [bbp-forum-index] shortcode for the Forums top level. If I go to that page in either of the latest versions of IE or Firefox, I get a nice page showing the Forum categories. Using my Android phone, I get a page containing the single word ‘Forums’. As the OP noted, if I go directly to a Forum category or topic all is well.

My WordPress version is 3.8, bbPress version is 2.5.2. I am using a copied and modified version of the TwentyFourteen theme.