[Vili]

Ok, thanks again! Much appreciated.

[Vili]

That is indeed it, thanks! So I was barking the wrong tree, nothing wrong with WordPress being able to access bbPress.

Where should one look for bbPress function documentation these days? I notice that I have difficulties finding information, and when I do find something, figuring out if the functions are for bbPress 1, bbPress 2, or BuddyPress is sometimes difficult. There is some sort of a list here but bbp_get_topic_tag_names() is not included, among others.

[Vili]

I have anonymous posting disabled. The setup, as described in my first post (the bbPress setup tries to mirror the WordPress setup as closely as possible):

At the WordPress side, things work flawlessly spam-free with anonymous comments disabled, a custom question in the registration form (stops most spam bots), a mandatory e-mail confirmation for new subscribers, auto-moderation of the first comment (stops manual spammers) and Akismet (which doesn’t really have anything to do at the end). On the bbPress side, I’m only missing the moderation of a user’s first comment, which is letting through some spam.

Anyway, I don’t really want to turn this into a troubleshooting exercise for the bbPress Moderation plugin as that’ll just needlessly eat up your time. 🙂 I can give the plugin another go later if I decide to go down that route. But thanks again!

[Vili]

Thanks for your time and effort in trying to help me Robkk, but I am aware of the above. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I have been using and developing with WordPress since around 2005 and my history with bbPress goes back to when it was first publicly released as the 0.x versions. So, I do know my way around the systems and have an understanding of how things work in general and what to do if they don’t. Still, I do appreciate your time.

I also don’t doubt that bbPress Moderation works for most installations. It doesn’t for me (every post gets moderated, even after approving a user’s post), which may be due to my theme but could also be because of a plugin conflict, as you mention. The question then becomes whether I start troubleshooting my installation for a plugin that doesn’t appear to be supported any longer and based on its support forum seems to have some kinks, or if I should try an alternative approach in case someone has found a better solution to the problem. Considering that this thread has been here for almost a week now, I am starting to think that no alternative solutions are going to come up, which then leaves me to either try to get bbPress Moderation to work as you suggest, or write something myself.

A third option could be to wait for the maker of the bbPress Notify (No-Spam) plugin to come up with something, as his future plans with the bbPress Moderation Plugin Add-On appear to be to turn it into a successor for bbPress Moderation. But that one’s not here yet (if it ever will), and it of course also comes with a recurring subscription fee.

Or I could wait for this feature to end up in core bbPress itself, as you mentioned.

Well, at least I have options. 🙂

[Vili]

You can bulk delete spam posts in the WordPress backend to make things go faster. There is also a plugin to autodelete spam replies on wordpress.org.

Unless I’m missing something, since the problem in my case is that some spam posts get through (don’t get marked as spam), a plugin that automatically deletes spam posts wouldn’t really help here.

To reiterate: the problem I’m trying to solve is manual spammers who register on the website and post on the forums. The most straightforward way to combat this would seem to be to moderate all messages by new users, which is a built in function of WordPress but not bbPress. The bbPress Moderation plugin in theory offers that functionality but doesn’t seem to work for me and also doesn’t appear to be maintained any longer.

[Vili]

As much as I tried earlier, I couldn’t really get bbPress Moderation to work. It may have something to do with my theme, but I also see that I’m not the only one with problems.

I’m not sure if I follow what you are saying about Spectators. Since they cannot post, there isn’t really any moderating to do either as far as I can see. Or am I missing something?

I’m increasingly thinking about writing a custom plugin. I suppose one basic idea would be to create a new user role like “Untrusted Subscriber”, make it the default role for new subscriptions and mark all comments, topics and replies by such users as “pending” until the user is updated to regular “Subscriber” status. The system should also serve a page explaining this when these users post. Something like that.

I’m just not entirely sure if it’s more time and effort to write the above than it is to manually delete spam messages and users. So, I was wondering if someone else may already have found a solution.

[Vili]

To answer myself and help anyone else looking for a solution, it seems that the bbConverter plugin is able to do the job: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbconverter/

I still have some issues with the conversion, like the first post of every topic showing html code, but at least I’ve made progress.

[Vili]

Have you found a solution to this? There seem to be a number of people with the same issue, and no solution that I can find.

I have the issue, running a bbPress 1.x installation integrated with WordPress. I’d like to switch to the 2.x version, but the importer gives a fatal error.

[Vili]

(The blockquote markup doesn’t seem to work anymore?)

_ck_ wrote:

Drafts are for blogging systems.

I can’t imagine why a forum would need drafts.

Indeed, a typical forum would most probably not need a draft feature.

But in my case, many posts to my forums are mini-essays in film criticism, or responses to such essays. As one write-up tends to take its writer a number of days to complete, that writer needs either to write the post elsewhere or at least to save the drafts somewhere. It would just be easier if that “somewhere” was the forum software itself.

I’d like to encourage thoughtfulness, contemplation and careful argumentation on my forums over the regular “reply as fast as you can” attitude that plagues so much of online discussion. To boost the “signal to noise” ratio, so to speak. A function allowing one to save a draft and give it one more read before publishing would perhaps further encourage that attitude.

Thanks for the hint about modifying the post status! I’ll see what I can make of it.

[Vili]

Thanks for the suggestion, Null! _ck_’s plugin is indeed not quite what I had in mind, but I’ll see if it gives me any ideas about how to implement a draft feature.

[Vili]

deliciousbass:

The “latest discussions” list at http://akirakurosawa.info/forums/ is compiled without the use of WordPress or bbPress loops. Instead, it makes use of two direct hand-crafted MySQL queries to the database, one to the WordPress tables and the other to the bbPress ones.

Basically, both queries search for all the posts (or comments, in the case of WordPress) written in the past month, then put these posts into various arrays. The arrays are then sorted so that the items are in a reversed chronological order, and finally the resulting list is displayed on the page with only the latest post/comment from each thread/blogpost/page included.

In case it is any help, here is the code that I use — I wouldn’t suggest just copy-pasting it to your site though before reading it through and knowing what you are doing. You may at least need to change the table names. I have added comments to give some idea what is done where.

See the code here

There most probably is a simpler way to do this, the php code could be streamlined, made more error-resistant, and it could possibly also be done with WordPress/bbPress tags, or it could be turned into a plugin, if someone has the time and the energy.

[Vili]

They certainly deserve the free hugs, and more.

If it wasn’t for the two (and of course many others who have helped here and there) I don’t think I would have got as far with bbPress as I have on my website. I just keep wondering how they find the time to be so helpful!

Thanks, guys!

[Vili]

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I had already got to the stage of banging my head against the wall a few times because of this, but now it’s finally sorted out and my forums don’t throw up those nasty 404s when validating and being indexed by search engines.

Thanks, beaulebens!

[Vili]

I have the same problem at http://akirakurosawa.info/forums/ : the main forums feed shows a totally blank page. Other feeds seem to work fine.

Have you managed to solve the issue with your site, agentmaximus, and if yes, how? I have gone through the forums here, but I haven’t found an answer.

I have actually had this problem for quite a while now, but only now finally decided to see what I could do about it as I updated the overall look of my site.

[Vili]

kenzor — That would indeed work the same way and be far easier to do. It remains a mystery to me why I didn’t do it that way to begin with. I must have lost my +5 Blessed Boots of Intelligence at some point.

[Vili]

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php global $forumpage;

$forumpage = TRUE; ?>

…should be the other way around:

<?php global $forumpage;

$forumpage = TRUE; ?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

You need to set the $forumpage boolean before you call the header, or you won’t be able to use it there.

Alternatively, forget about $forumpage, and use a global boolean such as $bbdb that bbPress uses anyway, as suggested by fel64.

[Vili]

“If you are at home, you wouldn’t reply or create by email because you would be just as easy to login to your forum.”

I think this assumes that everyone uses a broadband connection that is always on, which is globally not the case especially in the developing world?

I know this is not for everyone, but I for one would be interested in the functionality provided. I wouldn’t use it on all of my forums, but a few of them could really benefit from it.

[Vili]

Thanks for the input, guys!

[Vili]

My header title tag reads like follows, I think you can modify it to fit your setup:

<title>

<?php if ($forumpage == TRUE) {

bb_title();

echo " :.: AKNI";

} else { ?>

<?php wp_title(' '); ?>

<?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' :.: '; } else { echo "AKNI: "; } ?>

Akira Kurosawa News and Information

<?php if (is_utwtag()) { echo ': '; UTW_ShowCurrentTagSet('tagsettextonly'); } ?>

<? } ?>

</title>

The last condition with UTWTAG is for the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin — remove it if you don’t use it.

To see how the title works across the site, I think it’s easiest if you just visit http://akirakurosawa.info/

[Vili]

Just to make sure, you don’t actually use “require_once(‘path/to/wp-blog-header.php’);”, but rather have the “path/to/” bit modified to correspond with the correct folder path to your WordPress installation, right?

As far as I can see (and I am no real coder, either), somehow your current setup still fails to connect to WordPress, and therefore the WP functions, including get_header, are unavailable to bbPress.

[Vili]

As far as I can see, the question marks appear on Firefox wherever an “em dash” (–) should be. (On IE they are small boxes, and on Opera question marks inside a diamond.) This basically suggests that the character there is for one reason or another something that these browsers can’t display.

I don’t know why, though. Have you modified your template files?

[Vili]

I would personally prefer to have a completely new profile page, not just a revamped bbPress one. The ultimate solution would of course be to allow the admin to choose whether to use the WordPress, bbPress or completely new page for user profiles. But that would again make the whole thing even more complicated.

It’s a good point about redirection — the plugin should indeed make sure that all links to profile pages would go to the one set by the admin as the one to be used. (Whether WordPress, bbPress, or a totally separate page.)

[Vili]

Hmm. Actually, the code that I copy-pasted from the above seems to be different from what I have on my hard drive. At least a number of “<p>” tags appear to be missing.

[Vili]

There’s something odd there, as the code is 193 lines long, i.e. the line 193 includes only “?>”.

Anyway, I’ll send you the code in a sec by email.

[Vili]

Ah. Yes, I use “require_once(‘path/to/wp-blog-header.php’);” in my bbPress config.php.