[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 6 years, 10 months ago]

Caching plugins misbehaving could definitely contribute to problems in a lot of areas.

Private and Hidden forums also do work a little bit strangely, especially without BuddyPress Groups on top of them to manage them a bit better, and especially when you have a mix of public and private within the same branch of a forum tree.

Imagine, if you will:

Public 1
|--Private 1
|--|--Public 2
|--Public 3

Now, I login and create a Topic in the Private 1 forum.

How should that bubble up to the parent Public 1 category?

Then someone creates a topic in the Public 2 forum. How can a public forum even exist under a private forum?

bbPress won’t prevent you from doing these things, but it won’t really work very well when you do.

I think, to work best, we could never cache these values ever, because they’d always be based on what the currently logged in user can see, instead of being attached to the forums or the categories like they always have been.

But for now, for performance reasons, these Freshness values are working as intended, even though they aren’t a real great experience for Private and Hidden Forums underneath other Public ones.