[_ck_]

bb-load essentially loads the entire bbpress framework

It just doesn’t generate any template output

It’s how RSS feeds, etc. are done

You can indeed evaluate the user login via loading the entire framework. But you can also write a very small subset of code to check the cookie and then read the database directly too.

However note that if your bbpress cookies are locked to a path (ie. /forums/) as they are by default, they will not be valid outside of the path and no user will be detected. So you have to change the cookiepath in config.php

Otherwise neither method will work.