[kevinjohngallagher]

Looking in “favourites.php”, right in the root of BBpress (so its not hidden), i found this:

$topics = get_user_favorites( $user->ID, true );

I’d use that and output the array, but then again, i’d not have bumped 2 different 2 year old threads, let alone doing it before looking in the file cunningly named Favourites.php

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi there,

This is someting bandied about every now and then. There are a few issues stopping this from happeneing

1. A new version of BBpress is coming out soon
2. Given BBpress’s track record, it might/will/possibly break all/most plugins
3. Who should determine which are the most used plugins
4. How do we know which ones work and don’t work

_ck_ gave up a huge amount of time for BBpress, and in the end, did not get the same value back out of BBpress/Automattic/Community. Its hard, as a developer, to see what happened with _ck_ and want to go down that path until things are sorted out.

I wouldn’t waste any time developing plug ins for a platform that I know is going to change in the near future, possibly breaking my plug-ins again

-chrishajer

Chris Hajer is one of, if not the, moderator around here, and a well respected cool calm person. Even Chris, who obviously shares our love for what BBpress could become, feels that plugin development right now would be a waste of time.

If you have a specific bug with a plugin, come back and post it here. It might be a quick fix. But if you’re looking for “the coders here” to rewrite a bunch of plugins off our own backs, well, it ain’t too likely i’m afraid.

Take care.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’d advise against that mate.

Tagging isn’t that useful or accurate, its really just a glorified search field.; not to mention its something that the end users don’t really use that often.

If you really want to do it, then its a case of running through X posts a time searching for your own predefined keywords/tags and iff they match then adding the tag to the database. That would be outwith BBpress though, just running an PHP page with SQl on it.

I wouldn’t suggest it though. I recently did it with a football website and found it to be 1) a pain 2) less accurate than i thought and 3) pretty useless.

[kevinjohngallagher]

There is no real solution.

We all have that problem, its a pain.

There are one or two plug-ins around which apparently fix it, but i’ve had issues with them both.

Sorry

[kevinjohngallagher]

Akismet is a plugin that automatically determines if a post is spam based on certain criteria. That criteria though is set up for a blog, in which users (commenters) act differently than on a forum. Akismet will catch say a very large percentage of your spam (close to 100% of obvious spam), but has a tendancy to mark alot of forum posts as spam when they are not. These false positives generally occur with forum posts that have more than 2 links, are longer than 2 paragraphs, or from someone who has posted too quickly or too often for the algorithm to accept it.

It is really up to you and your particular forum whether you think Akismet is a good fit. I’ve disabled it on quite a few of my forums simply due to the huge number of false positives, and the feeling of hostility that generates from long term posters.

Captcha’s , of any kind, should be avoided if possible. Users hate them, and the data out there suggests that they’ve become fairly redundant in the past year.

Project Honeypot, and equivalent plugins, work well, but again have issues that hit a small percentage of users. If you have a small forum, that small percentage may be every easy to manage. If you have a big forum, its more of an issue.

Moderation is really the best way to beat spam, especially on BBpress. As Grassrootspa stated above, BBpress forums get an huge amount of people/spammers/fake accounts registering but not doing anything. I personally dont allow anyone from “.ru” or “.cn” on my forums, becuase they’re not aimed at that market, and that has cut down on a HUGE amount of my spam (and i apologise to anyone legitimate who has one of those email adresses). My other action is to spend 2 minutes everyday deleting users and their posts. Mass-Delete by _ck_ is a wonderful plugin that shows you the forum’s users ordered by actual useful info , god only knows why this functionality is not in the core, and you’ll find that this will allow you to handle alot of the spam very quickly and before it happens.

After about a month of one of my forums getting a large spurt of spam, i wrote a simple sql script on a page to delete anyone who matches very cimple criteria (12 hours between registering and activating, username included certain words etc). I set that up as a cron job to run every hour and now spam is non-existant.

Basically, if you want a spam free forum, and that forum is going to be a considerable size or easily found on google etc, you will have to think outside of the box and self-moderate regardless of the forum software used.

Take care,

Kev

[kevinjohngallagher]

P.S. Please don’t bump topics because you’ve not had an answer in two hours.

bb-lover.

We’ve told you waht the problems are, we’ve done the hard bit. We’re here giving up our time to help, not to do your work for you mate.

[kevinjohngallagher]

hi bb-lover,

1) Google is not indexing your “http://www.justinbieberzone.com/forums/” because your wordpress sitemap is telling it to look at “http://www.justinbieberzone.com/forum/” which exists, works, and is not using BBpress.

Also the spam at the bottom of each page to ‘improve’ your search ranking is probably hurting it.

2) itt appears to me that you’re attempting to run BBpress with “deep integration” (i.e. inside wordpress), and to do that you’re running the wordpress header. As wordpress doesnt know about “/forums/” its throwing a page not found error in the title.

Good Luck,

Kev

P.S. Please don’t bump topics because you’ve not had an answer in two hours.

[kevinjohngallagher]

May i suggest that this NOT be a BBpress plugin but rather a WordPress plugin. It seems like a cURL post might be a better solution, and alot less hassle than an RSS feed parsing.

Just my two cents.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Exactly, so just take 1 away from the total posts and that leaves you with how many replies there are

$number_of_posts = int $result->topic_post;

$number_of_replies = $number_of_posts – 1;

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hey Kevin,

I tried your code, it’s not working.

which bit mate?

Also you’ve nit asked fir how many replies, you’ve asked for how many posts (which will included the original), so just take 1 away from the number Nd you get how many replies there are

[kevinjohngallagher]

BBprogress had two versions of this one mate, they should still be kicking around somewhere. The first one used Ajax to convert the links (it pinged a search page for @username).

That said… My issue with it at the time is my issue with what you’re trying to achieve as well. 9/10 when someone is typing “@Michael R” they are replying to a post above. To that end, the “@Michael R” should link to that post, not to the person’s profile page. What you effectively need is a “reply to” button as well as a “quote” button that pre populates the “@Michael R” information.

Writing that functionality isn’t a problem (check out the quote plugin), but rather that there is no hook in BBpress that doesn’t hardcode output from the core to the bottom of each post. Not only would you need a plugin, but you’d also need a theme with additional hooks/function calls.

Its definitely doable though, once yu have defined exactly what it is you’re after/the need is for it

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’m writing this from an mobile phone so apologies if you have to double check the code:

$post_timestamp = strtotime( $result->topic_start_time );

$current_timestamp = time();

$time_difference_in_seconds = $current_timestamp – $post_timestamp;

$number_of_seconds_in_24_hours = 86400;

if($time_difference_in_seconds < $number_of_seconds_in_24_hours)

{

echo date(“H:i a”t, $post_timestamp) ;

} else {

echo date(“jS F”, $post_timestamp) ;

}

Its the long winded way of writing things, but I find its slightly easier to follow what’s going on. Oh and you probably don’t need to assinn all the variables, i just did it so i didn’t have to comment the code

[kevinjohngallagher]

The same for fb-connect. An expert could solve the problem within minutes.

What you using as a basis for this statement mate?

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Sam,

Truly hope life is treating you very well!

Ah yes, that fateful day last December/January. While some of the language and feelings were a bit strong over that week, its funny how many of the points and issues and concerns raised are still with us today.

I’m quietly confident that I come across as a bit of a “donkey’s behind” sometimes, which wouldn’t be a million miles from the truth, I suppose I feel its a shame we’re in a similar position one year on.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I have a function for WordPress that outputs some code into the class section of an item:

e.g. <li class="<?php my_custom_class_ouput_function(); ?>"> comment/thread </li>

It outputs the user’s level after a specific string (e.g. user_level_5), the author’s name after a string (e.g. author_username_bob ), is the user an author (e.g. user_is_an_author) and if the user is the author of the original thread/blog post (e.g initial_author).

You can then set up the styles as you want to display them in CSS.

I’ll have a look at porting this to BBpress later on.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I’d wager Matt has a calming affect when he writes more than 5 words

I am also in agreement that “it will turn out fine”, the problem with that is there is no time limit. It probably will turn out fine in the end, or eventually, but how do we, the community (sic) attempt to speed up that process?

My concern is that we’ve been through this all before Chris. Remember the “its all fine so I made a BBpress Fan Page on Facebook”? Remember the definitive instructions on how to get BBpress and WordPress to play nice together, that instead of being in the documentation was a 7 page thread with the answers on how to actually do it on page 4?

I’m not meaning to bring up the past and use it as a stick to beat the BBpress people with, I just feel we go over the same things time and time again, don’t you? And so far, we appear to be repeating the exact same mistakes.

I dunno, i’ll try and come up with something, because I’m confident that we wont have a BBpress version that integrates with wordpress out of the box this year.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hello folks,

I appreciate you all taking the time to comment.

@chrishajer

Thanks very much for posting the links to where the IRC logs are kept. That is very useful information indeed. Its the sort of thing that should be on this website somewhere Respectfully, far too much information about BBpress is hidden in replies on threads, that once off the front page are relegated to history.

You’re also right about the 3 most common phrases/tags/topics on this site being independent (i.e. not “a wordpress integration plug-in” but rather plug-in being separate). But with BBpress not delivering on the wordpress integration part, and having changed so much under the hood in 1.0 that the plug-ins don’t work; surely we’re failing on the very key topics the community are worried about.

I wouldn’t waste any time developing plug ins for a platform that I know is going to change in the near future, possibly breaking my plug-ins again

-chrishajer

Which is where we find ourselves now. BBpress1.1 isn’t going to change any of this. its a “holding pattern” release. Matt’s already stated that BBpress is going to be a WP plug-in ( so integration’s not going to be looked at for 1.1) and that none of the big issues stopping plug-ins from working are going to be looked at in depth. So other than “rallying the troops” so to speak, what is BBpress1.1 going to give us? ANd what are we rallying the troops for – as you yourslf said, you/me/others aren’t going to build plugins for the moving target?

I suppose it reminds me a little bit of this:

http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2003-10-12/

You have a product that’s meant to do one thing, you rally support for the next version, present it to the masses and right before you do you tell them how awesome later versions that will make their code redundant will be. “Hey there developer, come make plug-ins and code for BBpress, yes sir code that will be pretty much gazumped when we integrate it to WP as they already have code that does this stuf… what do you mean you’ll wait for the working release? “

@Ryan Heller

I’d rather be developing plug-ins for BBpress, but as pointed out above, there’s not much point developing plug-ins for a moving target.

– Ryan Heller

Is BBpress1.1 going to change that?

@ipstenu

This made me smile a lot mate, thanks.

I’m an independent contractor and have worked as a PM/BA for the smallest to the largest companies; and you’re not wrong

That said, Project Management exists for a reason. Its a different skillset from development. And no matter the size of the company or organisation, holding a requirement gathering session and then ignoring the data is just daft.

@chrishajer

You’re spot on that we’re in no position to judge anyone. Matt, and automattic, have done some truly incredible software – I’d hate for my posts to be seen as criticising or judging for the sake of it. But I also feel that its ok for us to point things out from a different perspective. We all know what its like to be tied into software, even cool software like this.

We want to help, we want to make it better, we want to do that in a positive way; but I don’t know about you and don’t want to speak for anyone else – but the last 9months/year as a BBpress user/enthusiast has been really… difficult.

In that respect “We’ve done this before” isn’t a comforting statement.

This is free software, I’m trying to give back in the only way I can My plug-ins no longer work, the group of folks I used to make plug-ins and themes with have all abandoned the project. One of my sites is sitting with about 1000 comments a day/post and a forum that’s taking 200 posts a day (way more on match days – especially if my team lose). I’m tied in, and many others are too.

I’m not wanting to have strong words at Matt the person or Matt the head of automattic, heck the dude’s lovely and I can’t thank him enough. But “we’ve done this before”, while a throw away line and not a mission statement, isn’t that helpful right now. I appreciate Matt posting on the thread greatly, especially as he’d only posted 4 times in 2 years previous to Sam’s leaving (and probably for a good reason, that’s not a dig) – so I’m not going to hang the phrase around his neck forever. Its just that, from a PM point of view, which I know everyone hates, “We’ve done this before. Relax.” is a statement that strikes fear into my heart. Seriously, Kryptonite fear!

P.S. The captain of the Titanic had actually been on a ship before too

P.P.S Can’t believe I check in here on a Sunday! Have a great weekend all, and once again, thank you for reading

[kevinjohngallagher]

We’ve done this before. Relax.

Greatly appreciate you posting Matt, thanks.

With absolute respect though, we know Automattic’s done this before:

• we were here for BBpress 0.9 not integrating to 2 new versions of WordPress and not getting an update when WP did.
• we were here for Sam not posting an update/techy questions answered etc for almost 3 months weeks after 0.9’s release
• we were here for major announcements being slapping into page 3 of non-stickied threads – now apparently they’re half way down IRC logs no-one posts.
• we were here with the BBpress1.0alphas (who remember that fun and games)
• we were here with the awful BBpress1.0 rollout
• we were here with the awful BBpress1.0 testing/bug-fixing (“we have decided to scrap Beta testing and bug fixing and will move to RC1 next week”)
• we were here when the sole developer left
• we’ve had 1 upgrade to BBpress to coincide with 5 updates of WordPress

Thats not me being angry or upset or anything, its just that since the move to BBpress1.0 and the removal of the documentation site to be a porn site, all i can do is ask PM/BAquestions. I know we’re not the most loved bunch by developers (or anyone?? ;-]) but we have a skillset thats sometimes often overlooked by developers.

The developer, BBshowcase.com and BBprogress.org (2 main plugin developers/resources) have left the sinking ship. Heck the ship couldn’t do what it actually said for the last 18 months. With silence from Automattic for months all people could hear was the sound of the band who played us out. It’s great that you’re coming with liferafts and a new engine and any other nautical anaology (really shouldn’t have started this ;-] ), but when you get here and start making the same mistakes I don’t think its wrong for us to at least point them out.

Its great you’re here Matt, its great all the people putitng time and development into it are here (thank you all), and heck even if you don’t take BBpress in a way I personally want, thats cool. I’m not here for a personal agenda of the features i personally want. It just that this project screams out for a PM and instead its got a truly lovely lead developer that everyone likes so much they’re too scared/in-awe to say “Dude, please, take a step back a sec, this is mental”.

We’ve done this before. Relax.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

– George Santayana

[kevinjohngallagher]

In the nicest possible way, i haven’t looked at Trac since it was so woeful before, and a cause of some pain for the community (ask a question -> go to trac. Go to trac -> ask why trac is wrong -> earn wrath of ck -> be told to leave bbpress). As i look at Trac now, for the first time in 9 months, I see that YouTube support and Smileys are in there as bugs.

I apprecaite your efforts greatly Chris, but this might be the straw that pushed the camel back to other forum software until after 1.1.

[kevinjohngallagher]

This is, and has been, my Number One issue with BBpress since 0.9.

The inability to actually administer my own forums is sure;y higher priority than Email Notifications, Facebook, Smileys, YouTube integration etc. Reading Matt’s IRC transcript and Trac, apprently not.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Marius,

Thanks for contributing. I suppose that the issue comes down to one of stats and hard facts versus beliefs – and as we all know stats dont always win.

I think you are giving Facebook way too little credit.

I’m not, its a wonderful website and tool that i use often.

But these exact arguements were heard during the rise of MySpace, Okurt, LiveSpaces, MSNmessenger, AoL, Bebo etc etc etc.

Nothing lasts forever, and in the internet world, becoming the most popular and staying the most popular are two different things.

The question remains though, and no-ones given me any data otherwise to come up with a case we could debate, how benefitial would spending the time on an FBconnect plugin be for BBpress?

When it comes to instant messenger, MSN has been top dog for ever, contradicting your philosophy about topdogs

Except, that isn’t true!

AoL was top dog for a very very long time. Infact, MSN piggybacked onto AoL’s AIM service for its first 2 years, because by that time, AoL had been top dog for 5 years.

Then Yahoo and MSN were tied for years, infact Yahoo prospered greatly during Microsoft’s failed Hailstorm/myPassport/MSN-messenger-is-tied-into-outlook-express failed rollout.

Its easy to say with hindsight that MSN has always been top dog, but if you were there, you’d know its simply not true.

MSNmessenger really took off with WindowsXP, and as a Microsoft developer at the time, i can tell you that before then its market share of IM chat was alot lower than its percentage of possible users.

Everyone in my country uses MSN, and has for the last 10-12 years

Awesome. Its only been out 9 years though (unless you had Windows ME where this could be in your 10th by 7 weeks), but i’ll not quibble. The problem with these sort of statements is that “Everyone” is a statistical statement that means 100%. I’m confident not 100% of people (that use internet or even instant messaging) in your country use MSN messenger for the last X years.

The same is my issue with these generalisations about Facebook (or any website) once it become incumbant in its field. “everyone” uses facebook, like “everyone” or “most” use MSN simply isnt true.

Facebook has redefined the whole genre of social communication on the internet

I fail to see how it has redefined it actually. Simplified? Unified? Sped-up? I’ll grant you all those.

But publishing data to a group of people who’ve you’ve preselected to be allowed to see said data is not new; Neither is the instant messaging, sharing of photos, emailing each other etc.

It has become so widely used, that it’s incorporated in Playstation 3, Xbox 360, several cellphones, and in many countries – Facebook has been the platform for actual change

Thats a massive leap there mate, loads of things are on PS3, Xbox360, Cellphones etc.

Heck they all have an API so people can develop applications for them.

Bebo is on all of those platforms, are we now suggesting that Bebo is the platform for change? (and btw, Bebo is the # 1 social network in my country – not facebook).

My phone in 2004, and as i recall to some degree my xBox in 2005 – at least in signing in, had MSNmessenger on it. Sharing status updates, chatting, emailling and sending photos. Surely, given that this was on game consoles and cell phones over 5 years ago, this would be far more likely to be the platform for actual change than Facebook (was wasn’t even built then).

I think Facebook is pretty much gonna be the number one social website for a very long time

Again, its based on “i think” and not stats. For the record, I also think the same as you, but when it comes to committing resources, i base them off facts and not randoms hunches. Plus, i’m sure there were countless people who said the same about AoL, MSN, MySpace etc etc.

=====================================================

I’m real happy for these conversations, but i’m worried that we’re getting away from teh original point. I am not being disparaging of Facebook the website, platform, nor movie (is it still going to be Aaron Sorkin writing??).

But with so many people posting so often about how Facebook Connect should be the top priority/feature in BBpress, i am asking for your data so we can see if its worthwhile

[kevinjohngallagher]

Hi Chris,

Thats it yes, your example works nicely.

The thing is, i could always write a plugin todo a recurring loop through all parent/child nodes and count forums posts and update the latest one for each parent – but really this should be something in the core.

Effectively its a bug, and one i raised a year ago

[kevinjohngallagher]

@dailytalker

Merry Christmas mate,

The reason i was asking about what features SMF had that BBpress didn’t is that most of them you’ve listed so far have plugins to complete that task. Not all, i agree, but 90%.

Its not ideal, but they are there and they do work.

… SMF had a sophisticated bozo-user ban protection. You could ban by member-name, ban by IP-Number, ban by email address

BBprogress had 1 or 2 plugins that handled that.

EDIT: Infact form the last 4 plugins listed on their website:

– Admin block posts based on keywords

– Sin Bin functionality.

– Black mark functionality.

– Check registar against spammer database.

Why not just include the majority of them?

Because we dont have anyone to build them.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I belief that they would login if they could login with their facebook login.

The thing is, all the data we’ve seen from 18 months of Facebook Connect, not to mention people believing that they could pull people away from AoL/MSN/MySpace onto their own site in the past 10 years, all suggestes otherwise.

Thats not to say that it wont happen, it could and if it did i’d be very happy for you, but we have alot of data that says Facebook Connect will not be overly benefitial, and no-data to say otherwise.

Maybe it works, maybe not. It’s try and error. What’s wrong with that?

We don’t have the development resources. Right now we have 0 developers from automattic working on BBpress, though Matt is now taking an interest. If there was a huge desire or need for FBconnect someone would have build a plugin in the last 18 months. Sadly no-one has, and i think that on the whole, is the most damning thing. There has been a plugin for almost ever other feature mentioned on this thread – apart from FBconnect.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Thought i’d post another example using teh same website to make it clearer:

No posts:

http://fellowshipoftheding.org/forums/

(look at class mechanics on the bottom)

And yet it actually does:

http://www.fellowshipoftheding.org/forums/forum/class-mechanics