[evanevans333]

Interested in a solution for this as well. I would like AJAX Tags, and Tags required. An existing plugin recommendation would be great, or if anyone wants to do some code mod, I’m game to test it out 😉

[evanevans333]

I’m about to post this same issue. Getting it as well. His screenshots perfectly represent my experience as well. Was this a BuddyPress or bbPress issue in the end?

[evanevans333]

Oh my goodness! haha. That’s quite the coincidence, or is it? 🙂

Regarding your widgets and shortcodes, yes I am aware, but prefer to use my current widgets. The ultimate problem though is how it’s writing information into the Activity Stream in BuddyPress without said information staying under wraps.

Would you like to provide me a link to your support forum for your plugin (wow man, great job), and we can continue discussing these potential improvements to your plugin over there?

Best,
Evan

[evanevans333]

Hi Robin, thanks for helping some more…

What I’m saying is, I used a plugin called BBP PRIVATE GROUPS in order to “privatize” certain forums because the forum was set to be viewable only by people of a certain “group”. In that plugin, the main group is called GROUP1, which I just named “Subscribers” (just a coincidence that I name it that) and I can apply it to everyone who has registered (Subscriber role) on my website across the board.

Then I set the bbPress privacy of the Forum, to PUBLIC, and made it so that only GROUP1 people can access it in the privacy settings of BBP PRIVATE GROUPS, by setting that Forum to require GROUP1 access.

It’s an absolutely absurd workaround, because I’m literally setting the privacy to PUBLIC in bbPress and than using another plugin to make the Forum Private, but by doing it this way, at LEAST my Participant Subscribers can access the “Public” forum, so long as they are members of the BBP PRIVATE GROUPS – GROUP 1 “Subscribers” group.

So basically, I am doing what bbPress should do by default, but as a workaround with an entirely different plugin to handle it. The privacy restriction or permissions could not be properly handled with bbPress setting a forum to “Private”, so I am using that BBP PRIVATE GROUPS plugin to set it to private.

The ultimate goal of all this, was, to make sure that people who are registered to my site, can view and participate in Forums that anonymous/google/bots cannot see. But when I tried to do that by setting a forum’s privacy to “Private” bbPress annoyingly made it so that Participants registered with my website could go INTO the forum and see the Forum and Topic counts, and could post topics, but could NOT see the topics in there nor replies or reply to anything.

In order for a role to “See” those Topics and Replies, they had to be a Moderator, Keymaster, or Administrator. Even IF bbPress team wants Participant member caps to behave like this, they should at LEAST provide a role between Participant and Moderator, so that normal registered users of a bbPress enabled website, can participate in forum discussions cutoff from anonymous web viewing because they are set to “private”.

Now, the issue moving forward is, that topic and reply activity that go on inside those forums, is not properly being set to Private and so those Activities are showing up in widgets and shortcode locations and archives as public information, because those kinds of presentations of the information inside those forums are not governed by the BBP PRIVATE GROUPS plugin. In other words, it’s a mess, and this really should be handled by bbPress. bbPress should give us the ability to modify caps on Participant, or like I said, at least provide a ROLE that is an inbetween that is compatible with the development of all other plugins that work with bbPress (ie: we need bbPress to create this role as a standard).

[evanevans333]

Does this code still work? I tried it and am not seeing any results. I would like to be able to create sub-forums on the front end (as Admins/Mods).

[evanevans333]

Ok, on the above theory, I got it to work. Well the functionality anyway. I still can’t seem to mod the caps of Participant role.

But, what I did was use the plugin: “bbp private groups”
https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbp-private-groups/
and set the forums I wish to be private, to PUBLIC (ironic and backwards that is) in the bbPress Forum Attributes for a Forum, and in “bbp private groups” assigning the Subscriber role to the bbp Private Group “role” of GROUP1 (which I aptly named Subscribers). Additionally you need to set a user to that GROUP1 and select the option in “bbp private groups” to add users to that GROUP1 anytime they login (or you can manually in bulk update everyone (or just those matching a particular role) to have that permission).

[evanevans333]

I’m starting to get the feeling, that because Forum Roles are not meant to handle Forum privacy (as per the bbPress spec), that I am supposed to set their privacy to Public and use some kind of FORUM PRIVACY plugin to make sure the content doesn’t get leaked out to Google and anonymous web surfers. Is that the intention of bbPress? It seems that’s all we got to work with. Participant role is not supposed to be for wordpress Subscribers apparently. You need to become something else, to read topics and replies inside forums marked private, and I guess shouldn’t mark a forum private with bbPress unless it’s supposed to be private for Moderators and Administrators.

That seems so … ridiculous if you pardon my French. That Forum Roles are not for forum privacy, but more for Forum administrative privacy.

If I might back up for a moment, what I’m trying to achieve, is that Forums that I set to Private, contents are not visible by anonymous/bots/spiders, but are visible to registered users of the website (Subscribers, which I can set to automatically default to the Participant Forum role inside bbPress settings). It seems a sane, rational, logical concept. But I do see that this issue has been going on for YEARS.

[evanevans333]

Out of curiosity, is that a network site you tested on? Mine is not, and there is some talk in other threads about how the Participant role is designed for Network sites.

[evanevans333]

Oh, you didn’t mention that before. How can Participants see unpublished topics?

[evanevans333]

I can confirm though, your fix did not resolve the issue, using the minimal Theme “Twenty Fourteen” with all plugins except “bbPress” disabled. So, I’m not sure how it is fixed for you on your end. Are you running the latest bbPress? Do you have a minimal test configuration?

Thank you anyway though Robin, for your help.

If anyone else can help, I appreciate it. Thanks in advance! I will be monitoring this thread. I need a solution to this ASAP. It’s been almost 3 weeks and it’s holding up our website launch.

[evanevans333]

Alright Robin, well thank you for your expertise, and we can safely say we’ve made progress. We’ve covered ground. Stay tuned, because I must solve this issue, it’s been going on for 3 weeks, and I will solve this ASAP. Thanks again!

[evanevans333]

And just to confirm, I have deactivated all relevant plugins and changed to different themes and can confirm it continues to be an issue.

[evanevans333]

Okay, results are:

A Private Forum with 4 topics and 2 replies is viewable, but those topics and their replies remain unvisible to someone with the role Participant.

Furthermore:
The topics in there, are actually set to “Visibility: Public”. Doing a repair: “Relationships to Repair: Recalculate the parent topic for each post, Recalculate the parent forum for each post, Recalculate private and hidden forums” now, and the results are:
“Recalculating the topic for each post … Complete!
Recalculating the forum for each post … Complete!
Recalculating forum visibility … Complete!”

And the visibility of that same post is still set to “Visibility: Public”

And a Participant still cannot view anything inside that Private Forum.

[evanevans333]

I got the white screen of death with that code. The following error message:

Warning: call_user_func_array() expects parameter 1 to be a valid callback, function ‘add_role_caps_filter’ not found or invalid function name in /home3/filmsco/public_html/testwebsite/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 235

Had to add this to the top from your prior code:

function add_role_caps_filter( $caps, $role )
{
/* Only filter for roles we are interested in! */
if( $role == ‘bbp_participant’ )
$caps = custom_capabilities( $role );
return $caps;
}

P.S. Is this new code any different than the last code?

[evanevans333]

I came across this in a thread.
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/not-working-for-bbpress-rolesWould that be somehow useful? Probably not.

/**
 * FORUM - Role map
 * bbPress has its own internal ("dynamic") Roles, so we map our real wp roles to bbPress.
 */
add_filter('bbp_get_user_role_map','my_bbPress_role_map');
function my_bbPress_role_map($role_map){
	$role_map['student'] = bbp_get_participant_role();
	return $role_map;
}

[evanevans333]

I don’t know if I gave you this link before, but it does shed some light on to the reasoning of this “issue” and maybe that will help you know better how to circumvent/modify it to the way we’re looking for:

Roles and Capabilities in bbPress 2.2

[evanevans333]

Also keep in mind there is a tool in TOOLS for FORUMS which allows you to repair “private and hidden forums”, which as I understand it, just makes sure the currently set privacy settings properly are assigned and propagated down through child topics and replies for forums. In my practice, that is what it does. So, as a triple check, I also run that when troubleshooting, as a part of the granular process of debugging this.

That said, the above substitution you suggested, did not show anything different. That’s not to say we aren’t making progress! Any further ideas?

[evanevans333]

I don’t think so. According to this, those caps are not listed for Participant:

bbPress User Roles and Capabilities

But it makes sense they should be part of Participant caps right? I’m not insane? 🙂

[evanevans333]

Oh no kidding. Well yeah that makes sense right? On my install, even with all plugins off (except bbpress), the user Participant does not get Read Private Topics and Replies perms. Yes, I can confirm that.

I am using the Thrive Community theme by Dunkahkdis, and he said that was not happening inside his Theme and to come over to bbPress and ask in here. He’s not irresponsible either. He’s an amazing coder, and excellent with tech support. But, you never know. You never know.

So, just for clarity. You are saying, outright, that the Participant Role by default in bbPress is supposed to HAVE the caps: Read Private Topics and Replies
?

[evanevans333]

Also I downloaded and installed this plugin:

https://github.com/johnjamesjacoby/bbp-capabilities

and was able to “successfully” modify a user’s permissions to include the Read Private Topics and Replies, but even though in the user’s profile it showed up as modified, it also had no effect.

[evanevans333]

Didn’t work. No change in behavior (no cache running, no plugin conflicts). Maybe it should be if $role == ‘Participant’ instead of ‘bbp_participant’? Or perhaps ‘Participate’?

Am I supposed to put all this in the functions.php of my child theme? That’s where I put it.

[evanevans333]

Well I still appreciate you sending over the code. I will fiddle with it, and see where it gets me. Thanks so much. AND I will report back findings, in case it does solve something, so that others will see at least one solution. Thanks!

[evanevans333]

Following. Also need solution.

[evanevans333]

Well I appreciate the fast answer. Thanks for that. And yeah, I tried all those plugins. They no longer can reach in there and modify the Participant role. That role’s caps are apparently hard coded into the bbPress plugin itself, somewhere. I sure would like to transfer the ability that Moderator has to Participator, just on those two issues, Read_Private_Topics, Read_Private_Replies. That just makes sense, is logical, and practical. A lot of people have been posting about this, trying to make this right, for years now. We need at least a solution that works moving forward.

The concept is, that if you set a forum to Private, it’s because you don’t want anonymous users and search engines having access to those posts. It’s not because you want to restrict registered users from seeing the content, especially if they are Participants. And if to Participate means to just POST, not reply or see topics and replies in private forums, than there needs to be a User Role with those upgraded permissions, between Moderator and Participant. Because beyond Private, there is even the Hidden permission level. And that’s good for Moderator/Admin level access, but it’s too much if you just want users to be able to see and reply (Participate) in content that is not publicly accessible by anonymous website visitors and search engines.

Well, very well, I hope some fix comes someday. Somebody who coded bbPress needs to come up with an idea here.

[evanevans333]

Any progress on this? I am having this problem, and I am using the latest version of bbPress. Also at this point, bbPress Advanced Capabilities, nor Capability manager Enhanced, nor Members, nor any other Role Editor, will allow me to edit the Participant role.