[chrishajer]

What plugin did you find that was out of date? Maybe it can be updated.

[taoli]

HIi folks,

New BBpress user here.

I have a sensitive forum (political) and Id like to be able to approve users when they register.

I have found a plug to hide forums from non-registereed users.

The only plug I found that comes close to what I want is out of date.

Surely this is a simple thing? Can anyone point me in the direction of a plug in that would allow me to approve new users? (I have searched)

Any help gratefully appreciated, sincerely.

Thanks!

Taoli

[Process of Illumination]

Hello,

wp/bb sync used to work very well for me but all of a sudden i’ve got this problem:

the comment from bbpress to wordpress appears blank, no words in it. There is the name of the author, comment isnt in approval but is published on the site, counted in bbpress… just EMPTY, lol.

Plugin works perfectly the other way round, from wp to bb.

I am using WP version 2.9.2. and BBpress Version 1.0.2.

Does anyone has any advice, please? I really dont know how to get it back to work, i have tried and failed so many times, already.

Thank you very much.

[johnhiler]

Do you want to be able to approve topics/posts before they even appear on your site?

If so, this plugin is great but it only works with earlier versions of bbPress:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-moderation-hold/

I don’t think there’s a “hold for approval” moderation plugin that works with 1.0? But if someone knows of one, please post a link! It’s come up a few times in the past few weeks…

[Dailytalker]

Kevin, before I changed from SMF to bbpress I checked the extensions. I use the following plugins:

Activated:

allow images

image rezizer

bbvideo

Bavatars

BBcode Buttons Toolbar

BBcode Lite

bbPM

bbpress signatures

bbpress smilies

bbpress user directory

bozo users

members online

Not activated:

Askimet (do not like it)

Remove topic forum (unfortunately there is no updated version, it would be a cool thing for users who like SEO-friendly pretty urls)

open-ID (no facebook login and does cause problems with the current bbpress version; wait until its updated)

bbpress polls (causes some problems with my template)

bb topic views (did not find out how to change the language; does not work with poedit and in the files I did not fiend the word “views” so I cannot translate it in german)

ignore user (needs to be updated for the current bbpress version)

All this plugins are nice but with all this bbpress is ways apart from SMF. Thats why former members complaint about the change from SMF to bbpress. SMF allowed to write drafts before posting and other things not mentioned yet…

Regarding the spam problem: SMF and wordpress did solve that problem (wordpress has a lot of good spam protection plugins as well..no need for askimet). I have a pr 5 page and no problems with spam. Register option 3 usually is secure enough. Email-address needs to be proved and there is a captcha-code. If this is not enough you can use register option 4 (member approval) With member approval the admin has to activate new members. With this spam can be avoided. Further SMF had a sophisticated bozo-user ban protection. You could ban by member-name, ban by IP-Number, ban by email address etc.

Regarding the design of the new forum:

The new forum design is better than the design of the old forum. I am not a designer, therefore I don’t think like a designer. I am somebody who likes to have the overview. The new theme is better to keep the overview. On the top you have the latest posts. Beneath you have the different categories and subcategories. This structure is easy to understand. Further the new design allows me to place more ads. Also I work with a drop down menu. Did you use it? It helps too to keep the overview.

[Dailytalker]

Kevin, you can check yourself:

Old forum:

http://www.dailytalk.ch/forums/index.php

(I had pretty urls before but I removed them when I moved this forum into another folder.)

New forum:

http://www.dailytalk.ch/forum/

The old forum had a tinymce-editor with a lot of cool features…drop-down menu for font-size, drop-down menu for different font-style, drop-down menu for different font-color, you could put some letters up (for example “CO2” you could write with the 2 higher than the other letters and also deeper etc.) movies, pictures, links, quotes with name of the original author, message function to reporte abusive messages to the moderators, you could temporary ban members, you could move posts from one topic to another in a very easy and very nice way, sophisticated privat messaging, high security level no spam, you could in an easy way change the login requirements, sophisticated admin-section, admins could see the IP-Number of the visitors, very easy mod (=plugins) upload through integrated ftp-upload, ssi-functions and so on….

The change to bbpress was not an easy decision for me. In my opinion bbpress is still an adventure. Many bbpress-projects are on release candidate level. I used SMF for 3 years and was happy. The problem is that I also have blogs on wordpress and wordpress mu. I had some problems with integration of SMF into wordpress. There are certainly some very old bridges but the different codings didn’t make it easy to me. I integrated SMF with SSI-Functions to wordpress…but I think that because of the similiar coding bbpress is much easier to integrate into wordpress. Thats why I finally decided to give bbpress a chance. I’m somebody who likes to try out new or other things.

@hpguru, what you say is not true at all!!! I never ever had problems with spam when I used SMF!!! SMF offers different register opportunities. They have in the admin-section a so called registration management which offers four different options for registration:

1) Registration Disabled:

Disables the registration process, which means that no new members can register to join your forum.

2) Immediate Registration

New members can login and post immediately after registering on your forum.

3) Member Activation

When this option is enabled any members registering to the forum will have a activation link emailed to them which they must click before they can become full members

4) Member Approval

This option will make it so all new members registering to your forum will need to be approved by the admin before they become members.

Further they have captcha-codes which need to be entered in a registration field. (You can even change the level of those codes. They have different difficulty-levels).

New updates are shown in the admin section…is very simliar to wordpress and you can easy update with integrated ftp-upload.

[jimgozieo]

Is there a plugin with an “approve avatar (or gravatar)” facility?

What I mean is, is there a facilty to ensure that the avatar/gravatar does not appear on my forum until it has been seen and approved by my admin. So it would be in the queue pending approval by my admin, and the avatar/gravatar would not display on my forum until my admin have approved it.

Does such a plugin with such a facility exist? Appreciate your replies.

[Simon Wheatley]

There’s also another possibly I have been considering – only send to akismet the first few dozen posts by any new member. After that many they’ve probably met with your approval and any other moderation should be done manually, not automatically.

This is a very tempting solution. We’re getting so many false positives I turned off Akismet over the weekend, but inevitably Spam flowed in through the unmanned defences. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place!

[Demen]

Here is what I have thus far. bbpress is integrated with WordPress, So login is synonymous on both. However, I would like users to only be able to register from WordPress. I know it is pretty easy to just change the register link on bbpress to that of the WordPress registration page, but I also want to drop bbpress’s capability to send an email on either “Registration Mail” & Approval Mail settings. It is no longer needed if the user registers on the WordPress page and both are pulling user info from the same table.

Does this matter if I change the link to the WordPress registration page,and the settings are still available? And if so how would I go about disabling this?

[_ck_]

Akismet has lost it’s mind over the past several weeks or so.

Lack of whitelisting (as you discovered) is one of several pitfalls of using a remote service.

You could look at how my skip-akismet plugin works and check when $_POST contains submitted $_POST – if ‘post_content’ has only those whitelisted domains, you can unhook akismet as I do for mods, etc.

There’s also another possibly I have been considering – only send to akismet the first few dozen posts by any new member. After that many they’ve probably met with your approval and any other moderation should be done manually, not automatically.

[michael3185]

I’ve been interested in this myself, and have asked a few questions regarding spammers. One mostly private forum I’ve built will remain very small, perhaps 40 to 50 members max. Another, though, might grow quite large (though not in the thousands, I think). I’ve got the approve-user-registration plugin active on both, and caught one hand-spammer (sic!) with it, and just denied him.

I’m going to leave it active on the larger one too, and perhaps modify the register page so that ‘Website:’ becomes ‘Reason to apply’ (or similar). Then check for anything like a URL in any of the fields (even I can do that), and disallow if one is found. Saves me having to look at a stack waiting for approval. All I’ll need to do is read through those waiting, approve any that look fine, or email them to ask for validation of some kind if not. That’s my theory, anyway.

[johnhiler]

This plugin gives registrants a math test before they sign up:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/human-test/

This lets you easily delete spammy signups (you should back up database first, of course!):

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/mass-delete-users/

This is a bit hardcore, but you can actually hold new registrations for approval:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/approve-user-registration/

Hopefully one of those will do the trick!

[deadlyhifi]

The updated plugin has been working ok except it has major flaws

1 – The user displayname is not being put into the database – therefore all new users appear as a blank when they post.

2 – registration error messages aren’t displayed. (e.g. Invalid email)

The fix was straightforward. The bb_new_user function needed updating as so:

if (!function_exists('bb_new_user')) :

function bb_new_user( $user_login, $user_email, $user_url, $user_status = 0 ) {

global $wp_users_object, $bbdb;



// is_email check + dns

if ( !$user_email = bb_verify_email( $user_email ) )

return new WP_Error( 'user_email', __( 'Invalid email address' ), $user_email );



if ( !$user_login = sanitize_user( $user_login, true ) )

return new WP_Error( 'user_login', __( 'Invalid username' ), $user_login );



// user_status = 1 means the user has not yet been verified

$user_status = is_numeric($user_status) ? (int) $user_status : 0;



$user_nicename = $_user_nicename = bb_user_nicename_sanitize( $user_login );

if ( strlen( $_user_nicename ) < 1 )

return new WP_Error( 'user_login', __( 'Invalid username' ), $user_login );



while ( is_numeric($user_nicename) || $existing_user = bb_get_user_by_nicename( $user_nicename ) )

$user_nicename = bb_slug_increment($_user_nicename, $existing_user->user_nicename, 50);



$user_url = bb_fix_link( $user_url );

$user_registered = bb_current_time('mysql');

$password = wp_generate_password();

$user_pass = wp_hash_password( $password );



$user = $wp_users_object->new_user( compact( 'user_login', 'user_email', 'user_url', 'user_nicename', 'user_status', 'user_pass' ) );



if ( is_wp_error($user) ) {

if ( 'user_nicename' == $user->get_error_code() )

return new WP_Error( 'user_login', $user->get_error_message() );

return $user;

}



$user_id = $bbdb->insert_id;

$options = bb_get_option('approve_user_registration_options');

bb_update_usermeta( $user_id, $bbdb->prefix . 'capabilities', array('waitingapproval' => true, 'member' => true) );

approve_user_registration_send_pass( $user_id, $password );



do_action('bb_new_user', $user['ID'], $user['plain_pass']);

return $user['ID'];

}

endif;

although I am using a fairly hacked together install with some bleeding edge stuff in there so you may need to experiment a little.

[_ck_]

I have now fixed the Approve Registration plugin for bbPress 1.0a

as well as another bug it had with resetting passwords upon approval.

(it might also now work again with bbPress 0.9.0.4, untested)

http://bbshowcase.org/plugins/approve-user-registration_ck_mod.zip

[deadlyhifi]

Thanks for the reply _ck_.

I’m actually using it on a larger site than recommended and we have pretty strict forum policies so ban people for 24 hours when they slip up using the Ban-Plus plugin. The problem is people just set up another account and instantly start posting again.

We recently had a spammer, a human one who would deliver actual advice to a discussion, but then follow it with links to escort agencies and the like. We banned him but he just signed up again – 5 times in a row!

The 24 hours approval rate would solve all these problems. Just need to find some time!

[chrishajer]

Approve User Registration plugin works for the 0.9* series of bbPress:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/approve-user-registration/

[Ok Really]

I might be asking too much at this early stage …

* We need *all* user registrations to be approved by admin or a moderator.

* New users should have posting permissions in BBPress, but not the WordPress it is integrated with (unless those permissions have been explicitly granted by admin).

* Posting permissions in WordPress are granted by admin only after seeing evidence that the user is both responsible and competent to do so.

* It is easy to require admin approval of new WordPress users, but we would prefer all registrations to be through BBPress (there is no ‘register’ link on our WordPress).

Right now we are using WordPress 2.7, so we don’t have full integration yet. But it would be nice to think we might be able to work with our users in this way eventually.

[_ck_]

Michael should be finishing up from the WP 2.7 release and hopefully will be able to comb through his emails and bbpress stuff soon.

[geekjon]

Thanks. It was my first plugin submission, and I wasn’t sure.

[_ck_]

mdawaffe will typically approve it in a few days but he’s been very busy with the WordPress 2.7 release so it might be a little longer than that right now.

[geekjon]

How long does it take for a plugin to be added to the plugin directory?

[cfreview]

i like the idea ck. Why not take it one step further and allow voting to promote it to the front page, ala digg.

I want people to be able to post to the front page without any approval. Kinda a no holds bar approach.

[_ck_]

There are radical internal changes in 1.0 with the switch to the BackPress core, not to mention the cookie changes and some major db function changes which consolidated all the meta tables into bb_meta. The code is untested against most plugins. It’s a much bigger change IMHO from 0.9 to 1.0 vs the older 0.8.3 to 0.9.0 change.

However I don’t think it will take much to get it the final stamp of approval, maybe even late this month or early next, depending how many more features Sam wants to put into it. There’s still a whole bunch of open tickets:

https://trac.bbpress.org/report/3

I just don’t want it to be rushed to an official release like 0.9 was, which was followed shortly by 0.9.0.1 and 0.9.0.2 and then 0.9.0.2 sp1 – that’s embarrassing and makes bbPress look amateur.

Let’s get it right this time – report those bugs at http://trac.bbpress.org

[thion]

I have no idea where to post it so I’m using the less-invasive section of this forum . Is there any “guide to submitting a plugin” to bbpress.org/plugins/? I’ve clicked “Add your plugin!”, I recieved approval and “access to your SVN repository” but now what?

I never used SVN or Trac before, I have no idea what to do, I just want to share my plugin with others via bbpress.org . If there’s any “guide” or wiki page out there to help me out, please point me to it as I have no idea where to look for anything like this…

PS: I want coffeeeeeeee

[samuli]

I for one would appreciate the possibility for registration approval. I’m currently involved in a zero budget project to launch a forum on a sports related website that runs WordPress as CMS, and registration approval seems to become the last thing we need to solve before choosing bbPress (over Vanilla.) In this scenario, a registration approval plugin for bbPress would naturally be very handy. (I don’t think we have skills to make our own plugin.)

For what the approval thing is needed, then? For example, Vanilla discussion forum uses registration approval in a way we would appreciate to copy for our project. The idea of people not registering an account but applying for one would suit our project really well. “Why do you want to join this forum?” is a question we would like people to answer before letting them post anything.

A Finnish online magazine covering ice hockey, Jatkoaika.com, has a forum that has grown into a lively discussion community for over 13,000 registered users without losing its, well, usefulness. It’s not only because of strict moderation of discussions, they require their users to apply for registration as well. Given that the topic is ice hockey (you know, that game with all the tackling and fighting and strong emotions) and most forum users are hockey fans (“We want blood!”) and male (“We want blood!”), we consider that a great role model for this forum project of ours, even though we don’t expect our forum to become as popular (and we are not about ice hockey.)

(In what comes to our project, we might still decide to NOT having approval for registration. There are advantages in also not having that, of course.)