[_ck_]

Read-only forums are tricky to do as bbPress does not have any structure in place for forum permissions to the best of my knowledge, only user permissions to a certain extent. Apparently no-one considered forum control important in a forum program? Hmm.

The private forums plugin has to insert alot of code just to mange making forums invisible to certain users (and still can miss some areas). To make them read only, while removing the “new post” form seems obvious, it wouldn’t solve the problem as there are two or three places to create a new post (and apparently in future versions via trackbacks). Unfortunately none of that can be done via plugins, it would have to be a direct hack.

Perhaps in a future version they will consider forum permissions to make this easier. Other mature forum software has this ability, easily. I will look into how tricky the direct hack might be, probably not too hard, but keep in mind you’ll have to re-do it every time you upgrade.

One easy workaround for now would be to manually close all your posted topics in a forum.