[@chadschulz Participant 9 years, 4 months ago]

When I say single forum/topic/reply slug I actually meant for the single post-type slugs of forum/topic/reply. As the /forums/ slug is just a wrapper for all those bbPress custom post-types. So you could effectively remove the /forums/ wrapper and end up with just http://wwww.somesite.com/forum/name-of-specific-forum/. If you rename the single /forum/ slug to /forums/ it would become http://wwww.somesite.com/forums/name-of-specific-forum/ or something similar with topics like http://wwww.somesite.com/topics/name-of-specific-topic/

And adding the topic slug after the forum slug is not intuitive as the topics don’t actually exist inside the forums, they are simply linked to it–similar to a shortcut. This is something that can be done with breadcrumbs, however.

Again, permalinks can be rather tricky. In fact I’m fairly certain they’re the reason the “Private” forums are leading not-logged in visitors to a 404 page. I’d try putting everything back to the default settings and seeing if that fixes the error. Also, look at any customizing, plugins you might have that could interfere with bbPress defaults.

BTW, bbPress has a default error message for not-authorized users and “private” forums that should display. Again, something must be off in the settings/configuration.

My forum has no “private” forums, so I have little experience with this particular issue. Sorry.

Best of luck,
Chad