[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 9 months ago]

I guess we can’t post a security warning on the PM plugin… I just gave it one star instead, in the hopes that a lower rating would discourage people from installing it.

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/private-messages/

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 9 months ago]

Is it possible for someone to adopt the plugin… maybe Detective would be interested?

I’m just worried because 85 people downloaded the PM plugin this week! I know we can’t do anything about those 85 users, but maybe we can do something to help next week’s 85 downloaders?

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 9 months ago]

I just noticed that the unpatched PM plugin is still available in the plugins section, where it’s listed as one of the most popular downloads.

Is it possible to disable the download for now, until the code is updated with the security patch?

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 9 months ago]

It’s because it is a plugin that we’re all able to patch it without upgrading the entire bbPress install itself!

I agree that it’d be nice if the top plugins had security audits of some kind. Thank goodness a user reported this and another one fixed it though – that’s exactly how open source communities should work (ideally). Thanks merlin214365 and _ck_!

I do feel dumb for just installing this plugin without even looking at the code. I’m going to do a personal security audit, and report back if any of the plugins I’m using turn up with security holes. Hopefully we can use this incident to improve the overall security of the most popular bbPress plugins!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

There’s an excellent Private Forum plugin:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/hidden-forums/

And the ability to create and define custom user groups to access a particular forum:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/custom-user-groups

You mentioned a few social networking type plugins… have you checked out buddypress, the social network extension to WordPressMU?

https://buddypress.org/about/

It might be overkill for what you’re looking for, but at least some of the feature/plugins do exactly the sorta things you mention (galleries, pm, etc.).

Good luck!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

AFAIK, nobody’s worked out the WordPress 2.7/bbPress 0.9.x cookie/signin integration yet. If it comes, I’m betting it will take the form of a user-generated plugin… I don’t get the feeling that it’s on the official roadmap.

I agree that point upgrades to address compatibility would be nice! But I’m pretty sure that bbPress isn’t enough of a priority within Automattic yet to get the resources to make that happen. It sounds like that may happen within the next year tho.

As for the current state of things: I don’t think bbPress 1.0 is stable yet and more importantly, a good number the most popular 0.9 plugins aren’t yet fully compatible with 1.0. But that may change in a few months! In the meantime, I am hoping that bbPress 0.9 cookie/signin compatibility with the latest WordPress versions becomes possible with a plugin.

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

That’s a really high number of posts and pageviews!

My bbPress forum is # 12 on that top100 list. It’s not nearly as large as your phpBB site but I’ll share the scaling problems I’ve come across, in case it’s useful.

Probably the biggest problem I face is that the Google Sitemaps plugin doesn’t scale very well. I believe the most popular Sitemaps plugin regenerates the sitemap upon every publish; this hangs my site every time someone comments on a post. I’m actually exploring the possibilities around upgrading or programming the existing sitemap plugins, to provide a more scalable solution here. But without a good solution here, my content isn’t as Google friendly as it could be.

Also, the Akismet spam solution is decent… but the bbPress moderation management tools aren’t as robust as they are on WordPress. So moderating the spam queue takes a decent amount of time a day, especially as the site has grown larger. If the problem continues to grow, I’ll look into plugin solutions to help out here.

Finally, the account management tools on bbPress aren’t very robust. For example, I get emails every day from users saying they forgot their username, or would like to reset their password. bbPress doesn’t currently have easy ways for users to retrieve a forgotten username or to easily reset their password (they can reset the password, but first they have to put in a username/password and fail a signin attempt). I’m actually working on plugins and theme changes to address this one now, but it currently creates a decent amount of work answering emails from confused users.

My final concern actually is around bbPress 1.0. I am very happy on bbPress 0.9, but version 1.0 is around the corner and seems to be a lot less lightweight than the current version. I’m also concerned about the lack of backwards compatibility with some 0.9 plugins. This wouldn’t be a huge issue, but bbPress 1.0 is currently necessary to ensure cookie/signin compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.

If you are considering bbPress as a standalone forum for a huge site, I’d definitely recommend it – as long as there are plugins for all the features you currently support on your forum.

If you’re considering bbPress in conjunction with WordPress, I’d hold off until bbPress 1.0 comes out of beta and/or a plugin supporting bbPress 0.9/WordPress 2.7 cookie integration comes out.

Just my two cents… hope that helps!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

One note: I was using Private Forums for several years, and it had an occasional bug where if I saved my admin settings… the private forums would intermittently become public! I had to check the private forums every day to make sure they hadn’t been compromised…

The Hidden Forum plugin seems much more stable since I switched to it a few weeks ago, and there are no reports that I’ve seen of similar behavior:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/hidden-forums/

Just a heads up!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

You can use fel64’s unofficial plugin to add a new Role:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/adding-a-new-user-type?replies=6#post-9210

I’ve used this together with Hidden Forums, and it works really nicely!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

I use this plugin, but don’t get that error.

What version of bbPress are you on?

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

I haven’t tested this, but at least one person was able to get this plugin to work:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/threaded-posts/

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

You could use create a new Role, and then restrict access to a specific forum only to people in that role or higher using Hidden Forums:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/hidden-forums/

You’d still need a hook into Paypal, if you wanted to automate purchasing of access to your premium forum… but you could take that code from some of the existing WordPress or WordPress MU programs out there?

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

This would be huge for my forum… some of my best members are getting their posts regularly marked as spam, and it’s really upsetting for them!

Does anyone know if bbPress 1.0 has built-in support for this? Or if a plugin along these lines has been built in the past year?

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Oops, ignore what I wrote – ck would know best, since she wrote the plugin!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Do you want to hide the forum from everyone? Then you can use this:

$hidden_forums=array(5); // hide these forums, list by comma seperated number

If you want certain people to be able to access the forum, I believe this should work:

* If they are all adminstrators or moderators, you can use this: $hidden_forums[5]=array(‘administrator’,’moderator’);

* If you want only certain users (say, userID numbers 10 and 11) to be able to access forum #5, you can use this: $hidden_forums[5]=array(10,11);

Hope that helps…

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

There was a similar bug report posted – the earlier response might be helpful… or maybe the original poster might let you know if they ever found a solution?

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/latest-discussions-add-new-link-problem-if-not-logged

This might also do the trick (although it’s a bit kludgy):

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/strange-404-report-i-firebug#post-9540

There’s a plugin that allows anonymous posting, but all users are marked as with “anonymous”:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-anonymous-posting/

_ck_ wrote a cool plugin that lets you “add additional fields to posts like Name/Email/Website for anonymous users via Post Meta plugin”: https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/post-meta/

I don’t know how thoroughly it’s been tested, but if you are willing to run alpha software – it might be worth a shot!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

You can download and install the plugin here!

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/hidden-forums/

Installation instructions are here:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/hidden-forums/installation/

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

I plugged the text into Google Translate, and got this rough translation:

---

http://cartoon.lamost.org/ State Academy of Sciences

Chinese bbPress forum http://cartoon.lamost.org/forum.php?id=2

The question now is, it can paste the Chinese but not Chinese user name registration interface, sinicized also garbled, character set problem?

Welcome to visit and discuss

---

I may be misunderstanding this, but the question sounds like it may be: “I can’t register chinese language usernames using bbPress… why is this?”

If so, that’s because bbPress 1.0 doesn’t allow unicode usernames… only unicode display names.

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/arabic-translation

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/check-out-this-very-nice-r-t-l-arabic-bbpress

If the post said something else entirely, let’s pretend this comment never happened!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

I agree – more resources would be great!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Just out of curiosity… which features are you wishing to see in bbPress?

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

If that’s how it’s supposed to work, I could live with it. But the interface mentions Sticking a post in general versus Sticking a post to the “front”… but only one of those works seems to work as described.

So there seems to be a disconnect between what the interface implies, and how the feature actually works (at least, as I’m understanding it).

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Ah sounds like it’s still an issue in Version 1.0-alpha-2:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/using-sticky-post

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

This recently started happening to me when I upgraded to v .9… I don’t remember it being an issue in earlier versions.

Does anyone know if there are plans to fix this in future versions? Or is this the way it’s supposed to work from now on…

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

I’m not sure how to do that – but this plugin by _ck_ might provide another angle on the same issue:

* https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/instant-password/

It lets users pick their own passwords when they create the account…

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Just a heads up – you probably want to use the “Hidden Forums” plugin instead of “Private Forums”:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/hidden-forums/

As one user put it, “The plug-in is great, but somehow it turns off randomly”. That exact same thing happened to me twice, before I got fed up. Each time it happened, I almost had a heart attack!

“Hidden Forums” is a better version of the plugin, and has no reports of that bug.