[Kamorle]

Hi all. I have a WordPress site with a fresh install of bbpress on it for my forums. That said, the default bbpress theme for my site looks absolutely awful, so I was wondering how to install another theme or even just change the colors just for my forums. This is what it’s looking like at the moment.

I recently discovered this theme here that looks alright. Is there some way I could import that onto my site for JUST the forums? Let me know, thank you!

[Robkk]

This is the default font-size in the bbPress stylesheet. You can overwrite the statment or install a plugin like bbp style pack which I think would take care of this for you.

#bbpress-forums {
    background: 0 0;
    clear: both;
    margin-bottom: 20px;
    overflow: hidden;
    font-size: 12px;
}

[Robkk]

In BBpress each user has the ability to edit their profile users/USER/edit/
Here they can add their name, their website link and their bio by default. However, this information is never actually displayed on their profile. Why is this?

The bio should show.

https://bbpress.org/forums/profile/robkk/

As for most of the other fields, not sure really. I know though they are just going off of WordPress’s profile fields, and whatever is added to that though. I don’t know why the devs haven’t put at least website there. Maybe it is easy for spammers to take advantage of that?? First Name and Last Name could make good choices to display on the users profile too.

I will probably make a suggestion to the devs later to add more profile data to the user’s profile.

You can of course display the data in the profile by editing a template or installing a plugin.

Copy user-profile.php from the bbPress templates in the plugin to your child theme in a folder called bbpress.

Just surround the code with conditionals to only display the information when the user has inputted any information.

You have something like this for first name.

<?php if ( bbp_get_displayed_user_field( 'first_name' ) ) : ?>

	<p class="bbp-user-fname"><?php bbp_displayed_user_field( 'first_name' ); ?></p>

<?php endif; ?>

YOu can also use the plugin, to display the current fields and also custom fields.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbp-profile-information/

[Robkk]

Try some troubleshooting especially what is listed for plugins. Deactivate every plugin except bbPress to see if the topics can merge correctly. Activate BuddyPress right after to see if topics merge correctly in groups and normal forums. Next, activate every other plugin one at a time to see what could be causing an issue.

If you still cannot merge topics with only bbPress activated, try the other possible solutions listed like trying a default theme to see if that fixes your issue.

Troubleshooting

[drinkingsouls]

Hey guys,
In BBpress each user has the ability to edit their profile users/USER/edit/
Here they can add their name, their website link and their bio by default. However, this information is never actually displayed on their profile. Why is this?
On users profiles it says:

Forum Role: Keymaster

Topics Started: 0

Replies Created: 0

But the information such as their name, bio and website link are not displayed. Why are there options to add this information to the profile if it remains private?
How can I allow it to be displayed publically?
Thanks,
Chris

[Matoca]

@Robkk,
Some very good information here. I appreciate the post.

I have not done any significant WP troubleshooting since I discovered this only today when my moderators emailed me to say they weren’t getting emails. My first stop usually is the forum to see what other users might be having the same problems. Surprised me to find someone else having the same identical problem and at the exact same time. Since then I have been methodically going through the website to ensure that everything else seems to be working fine. Most important, the forum is working properly!

I keep everything up to date and I have WP set to auto update. And bbPress is also up to date.

I did not try the plugin yet because I want to check things in a certain order rather than adding another new plugin to my site and another layer of complications.

Yes, the notifications have been in place this way for quite a while. I see in my inbox that I was experimenting with it by Fall 2013 and put into place for notifying the moderators shortly after that. Since notifications are part of the default settings I would have seen them immediately and gladly used them. I wanted to avoid having a lot of email forwarders on the Bluehost server and this has worked extremely well.

I don’t allow comments on the site and so that isn’t something I can check. The specific purpose of the notifications for topics and replies is to help the moderators monitor the forum around the clock.

I have Wordfence on my website and it set to notify me of all Admin logins and other security alerts. They all stopped coming to my email on 8/5/15, another indication that something is amiss with emails, not necessarily with bbPress.

And an interesting development tonight that I am trying to sort out is that I use Gravity Forms on my website so that dog owners with very sick dogs can get Urgent Advice around the clock. The forms they fill out go out by email to all administrators as they are generated.

Tonight we got an Urgent Advice form submission and the notification did not come to my administrator address (and that means no other administrator got it) but it did come to the website email address (a Bluehost box). That also comes, as I said, to my desktop client at home. Otherwise I would have had to look in the dashboard forms to know it had been generated. This tells me that something may be wrong, not with bbPress, but with Bluehost emails. I have checked the notifications for Urgent Advice and it is still set properly to go to all administrators.

So my next step should be to check with Bluehost support to see why these many different notifications from bbPress, Gravity Forms and Wordfence that are being generated are not being sent to any administrator emails. I’ll get back here when I find out more.
Matoca

[Robkk]

This is because your font color of your site is white for the content, and bbPress forums are white and gray by default making your font invisible.

You can copy the bbpress.css from the bbPress plugin into your child theme into a folder called bbpress and customize the styles of your site.

Theme Compatibility

Or you can install a plugin like this, and put transparent for any background colors.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbp-style-pack/

[Robkk]

did you customize the bbPress templates by copying them into your theme??

Try switching to a default theme to see if the issue persists.

Troubleshooting

[Robkk]

It is part of your set of editable templates from bbPress. Like I said copy the file into a child theme in a folder called bbpress.

The directory “wp-content/plugins/bbpress/templates/default/” contains the directories “bbpress”, “css”, “extras”, and “js”, and the file “bbpress-functions.php”.

The “bbpress” directory contains template parts. Copy any of them into a directory named “bbpress” in your themes root, so it looks like: /wp-content/themes/%your-theme%/bbpress/

Theme Compatibility

[Robkk]

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.

If you make a plugin like that create a topic in the plugins forum on this site. This could also be useful in the core of bbPress too.

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.

If you are a plugin dev, you can always fork this plugin to make it work. If you want to share your forked version with other users for bbPress then you put your fork on the WordPress plugin repository.

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.

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.

[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.

[Stephen Edgar]

Yes that is an other problem, every languageID field is empty.
how can i solve that?

You shouldn’t need to do anything, if there is no value it will default to English

In the wbb1_1_board from wbb3 is the parentID “0”
but in wbb1_board from wbb4 is the parentID “NULL” (german for zero).
There are a lot of these fields….

Indeed Null is German for zero, also NULL is a special value in SQL databases.

Typically I’d expect a reply to always have a parentID, that ID should be the topic ID.

A topics parent ID will typically be the forum ID the topic belongs to.

bbPress will treat replies without a parentID as an “orphaned” reply because there is no association between the topic and reply id’s.

bbPress will treat topics without a parentID as a topic not associated with a specific forum, so unlike replies, bbPress does not require topics to have to have a forum id.

Forums without a parentID are treated as “top level” forums, forums with a parentID of another forum are treated as “child” or “sub” forums of the parent forum.

So some parentID values may be an integer 1, 13, 653 etc, sometimes it will be 0 meaning there is no parentID and other times it will be NULL, it is all dependant upon that forum softwares configuration and the context it’s being used in.

[project_subdomain]

It’s default German (informal) what I’m looking for. Should be the same for formal as well though. Could you provide a link to those so that I can try any of these again?

[Robkk]

Yeah that makes sense since the original file was for a user with a german/english forum I think.

You may not need this either since the original user had a german forum.

/**
	 * Set languages, add more languages if needed
	 *
	 * @param int $language WBB v4.x numeric forum status
	 * @return string WordPress safe
	 */
	public function callback_topic_language( $language = 4 ) {
		switch ( $language ) {
			case 4 :
				$language = 'German';
				break;

			case 5  :
			default :
				$language = 'English';
				break;
		}
		return $language;
	}

[UbbeGubben]

Hi all

Me again

Default there is one field (Subjekt title) and then the comments box!
But how can i make my own field instead of the (subject title)?

I would like to have 3 of my on spec fields (and the user Must fill them in)

Tnx

Urban Eriksson
tjuvkoll.se

[tkse]

No, I clicked, let it run and it never finished. I messed about for a couple hours after I wrote this and eventually got it to work by resetting the language to English, resetting forum, deleting bbPress and install/importing all over again with the default language. Don’t know if it’s a language files issue, but at least it worked for me.

[Vili]

I’m looking for a solution to moderate new subscribers, preferably in a way that regardless of whether it’s a comment on the WordPress side of things or a topic or reply on the bbPress side, once a new subscriber’s first post is approved, that user is allowed to post comments, threads and replies freely (unless caught by Akismet).

Has someone here faced the same challenge and successfully implemented a solution that works well and is a pleasant user experience for visitors?

The bbPress Moderation plugin should in theory be the answer to this, but it appears to no longer be maintained, I couldn’t get it to work on my website (it moderates all posts for me, even for a user whose posts have already been approved), and based on the plugin’s support section it doesn’t really seem to work optimally anyway. Which is a pity.

Another approach that I have been thinking about is making a new subscriber’s default user role something else than Subscriber, and never displaying comments, posts or threads written by a user with that user role (or displaying a “waiting for moderation” text instead of the post) until the user’s role has been updated to Subscriber. So, moderate a user rather than the content. I’m just not entirely sure how to implement this. Modifying the theme to accomplish it should not be difficult, but how about dealing with RSS, email notifications, etc. so that posts by these users don’t show in them? It seems that many things could go wrong and not play nicely with other plugins.

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.

Any ideas or experiences about a solution to this particular problem?

[K.Rens]

About: It’s the default page after you activate it.
Repair: it’s tools.php?page=bbp-repair I think. Found it on fora on how to fix it.

I simply do not see it in any of my menu’s and the pages direct links cannot be opened due to permissions.

[Robkk]

You have to create a new role and it has to have these set capabablites

'publish_topics' => false,

and

'publish_replies' => true,

While what I listed is oversimplified, you may need to adjust extra capabilities to your liking. To learn how to create a new user role with its own custom capabilities read this guide.

Custom Capabilities

You then set the default role in the forum settings in Settings > Forums in the WordPress backend.

To change existing users you have to change their forum role in Users > All Users in the WordPress backend.

[project_subdomain]

this works great for replies, Robkk.
Unfortunately it changed the default settings for public forums the same as for private forums.

Public forums
should be:
-logged in and out: read lead and replies
-logged in, also unsubscribed: read both and write replies

[drinkingsouls]

Are you running any special bbPress set up?
– I’m just running the default bbPress fresh from install

Does this happen to all user roles?
– Yes, it happens to all roles

I am going to assume on your fresh install you just have the latest stable version of bbPress and WordPress and no other plugins activated while using a default theme?
– Yes. I am using Twenty Fifteen theme. Up to date. No other plugins activated. The moment I activate bbPress users can no longer log out.

Thanks

[Robkk]

Alright I might report this as a bug, but I need steps to duplicate the issue. And could you answer these questions to help me, know where you are at?

Are you running any special bbPress set up?
Does this happen to all user roles?
I am going to assume on your fresh install you just have the latest stable version of bbPress and WordPress and no other plugins activated while using a default theme?

[PinkishHue]

I’m assuming by category you mean the forum that the topic is in?

You can remove the forum dropdown menu and use a hidden field here instead.

In your theme you need to have this file:

wp-content/your-theme/bbpress/form-topic.php

If you don’t have it, copy it over from the bbpress default templates at:

wp-content/plugins/bbpress/templates/default/bbpress

Then open your new form-topic.php in a text editor and find this part of the code:

<p>
	<label for="bbp_forum_id"><?php _e( 'Forum:', 'bbpress' ); ?></label><br />
	<?php
		bbp_dropdown( array(
		'show_none' => __( '(No Forum)', 'bbpress' ),
		'selected'  => bbp_get_form_topic_forum()
		) );
	?>
</p>

and replace it with this:

<input id="bbp_forum_id" type="hidden" name="bbp_forum_id" value="20">

Where 20 is the ID no. of the forum you want all topics to be created in.

Hope that helps 🙂

[Robkk]

Sorry for the late reply, I am going through some old topics to see if I missed something.

Have you tried disabling all other plugins AND using the default theme at same time? (difficult if the site is live of course)

If it’s not on a live site maybe try a fresh bbpress install? Also there are some repair tools in the settings you can try (I haven’t had experience using these but it’s worth a try)

Do this to see, and report back.

If it doesn’t work I might have to report a bug.

[Stagger Lee]

Yes, busy is the right word for Kunena official forum site.

It is nice and elegant indeed. Doesnt need to be complex and overdesigned. Why not put something like this as default ?
Wont add any new miliseconds to page load, just do it.