I am ashamed to say, that it seems that I found a solution that was staring me in the face in the settings panel for bbpress. I simply disabled the “Allow users to subscribe to topics” field, and that has done the trick well enough, sorry for the trouble.
I disabled all of the plugins except bbpress, and I also tried adding that code to bbpress/includes/common/functions.php and also to my themes functions.php . Maybe I am doing something wrong though, is there perhaps a way to hide the check box? That would work just as well for me.
Yes, I am not sure if I have another plugin that might be affecting it, but it is currently checked by default.
Yes, although I am not sure why.
