[Michael]

Unfortunately, I am not a plugin developer – but I think the idea is good. At the end of the day, there might need to be a little ‘push’ to get bbPress active again. This could be it.

[grassrootspa]

@kriskl:

I like where are going. Perhaps you are on to something. Building off your initial idea, what about some sort of 2010 plugin development contest?

As you noted, several people here chipped into _ck_ and got their money returned. I’m sure those same people might be open to something like this.

Heck, if we had some ‘bbPress plugin contest’ I’ll chip in something.

Anyone else like have any thoughts on this? Would anyone else be willing to donate toward a bbPress plugin development contest?

If we can get 10 folks to match one another at $25 or $50 each we can get a small but sizable initial pot built.

The Sandbox development contest back in 2007 initially had $500 total to distribute between 1st, 2nd and 3rd place (http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2007/05/31/announcing-the-sandbox-designs-competition/) After some sponsorships the total in competition prizes rose to $1950. (http://sndbx.org/details/)

Look, the top prize is most likely not going to be a zillion bucks, but it its not a bad idea to stick a steroid shot in the plugin development arm and get some more people fired up (or fired up once again) about bbPress development.

Heck, even if someone took an existing plugin that didn’t work with bbPress 1.02 and updated it, this would be an improvement.

Perhaps this plugin contest could be scheduled/built around around the revamping/relaunching of the bbPress.org site and the introduction of the new bbPress codex section.

Thoughts? Anyone else willing to match a small donation toward such a contest? Haha, if people like this idea, the bbPress Theme contest comes next

[hpguru]

Not included to bbPress just now.

[chrishajer]

kjg (sorry, too tired to type):

see this http://www.lawserver.com/forums/

Do the totals work the way you want for forums/parents/subforums? That is bbPress installation I integrated with Joomla of all things. I believe I fixed the problem with a plugin or some custom code so if this is the end result you’re looking for, let me know and I will look back at how I did it.

[chrishajer]

> Why not just include the majority of them

Finite resources. WordPress didn’t become great by cramming a bunch of features in. WordPress is great because of the ability to add plugins and themes. Any feature you want, and any look you want, is available in WordPress using a plugin or a theme. If there needs to be a new hook added to WordPress to allow a plugin to accomplish something, they generally do it.

It’s taken WordPress a long time to incorporate into the core a lot of things that used to be plugins, and maybe should still be plugins. bbPress is nowhere near that stage yet.

[chrishajer]

> What’s wrong with that?

Again, the only thing wrong is that there are finite resources and there needs to be a good case made to devoting resources to adding new features to bbPress. There’s nothing preventing anyone from developing FB Connect as a plugin for bbPress. If there’s an itch, someone will scratch it.

[Dailytalker]

Kevin, the thing is that I have several facebook groups. Each group has its own forum. What I want is to bring all those groups together in my forum. Each group forum would become a category in my bbpress forum. I’d like to invite the people of some facebook groups to join my forum. I belief that they would login if they could login with their facebook login.

Maybe it works, maybe not. It’s try and error. What’s wrong with that?

Merry Christmas

[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.

[kevinjohngallagher]

Personally,

i doubt _ck_’s main reason for leaving the project was money – she just wasn’t that sort of person. She’d thrown so much time and effort into a project that had gone off at a tangent to what it set out to do, and then its lead developer (actually, only developer) quit. _ck_ was basically left holding the bag, and (again, my own opinion) it may have appeared to her that things weren’t going to change for the better any time soon.

Your idea’s a lovely one, but a little impractical. Given the lack of documentation, huge changes to the codebase, and amount of hardcoded outputs – writing any sort of plugin for BBpress easily becomes somewhat of a quagmire. It gets to the stage where the cost (in terms of time) for developing the plugin would be huge, and i’m not sure that donations from the board are ever going to come close to matching that.

A slightly modified suggestion, is that if someone pays for a developer to edit/fix/create something for their own BBpress installation, then they could donate that code to the site. That’d be far more likely to produce tangible results.

Merry Christmas

[kevinjohngallagher]

Thanks for the info Dailytalker, always great to hear real world examples.

The issues i have is that almost all of features which your users could use are availible for BBpress as a plugin. TinyMCE, Quotes, report users/posts, are all availible as plugins. Changing login requirements and temporary bans are also availible as a plugin.

Private messaging (and there is a plugin) is a funny one because some people love it, most think its useless when there’s such a thing as e-mail. Not to mention it just leads to added spam.

“high security level no spam” is something i doubt, because so far, no-one has been able to elimate spam. Google/microsoft/apple – you name it – they get spam. Its more than likely that your particular board got no to little spam, and it was picked up.

For me, these 2 stand out:

you could move posts from one topic to another in a very easy and very nice way

sophisticated admin-section

These are the issues i face with BBpress everyday. I know that different people will be faced with different problems, but when we simply can’t fully administer BBpress, surely its the feature that has to come first.

If you dont mind me saying also DailyTalker, your old forum looks far more like a forum than your new BBpress one (which looks very plain and boring). I’d definately suggest creating a theme to make your two forums look the same. This will make life easier for the users

Thanks for the discussion, and have a merry christmas.

[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.

[Lexey]

Hello everybody!

Unfortunately I have no mysql extension installed on my hosting. Has anyone the latest version of BBPress with MySQLi support?

[johnhiler]

fel64 and henrybb made plugins like this… then _ck_ improved on them with this:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/unread-posts/

[citizenkeith]

One of my users, who is running Linux Mint 8 with Firefox, started getting a “Save As” dialog from Firefox when clicking the “Log Out” link in bbPress. It started as soon as I activated this plugin.

We’re doing some additional testing to see if it continues. I couldn’t recreate it with Windows and Firefox though.

[citizenkeith]

@nextwave: What gives?

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbshowcase-shut-down

[nextwave]

It’s a bit out of date- but ForumMatrix: http://www.forummatrix.org/ allows you to compare feature sets.

[Michael]

I missed this one – sorry about that. Looked like an interactive meet – nice to see some changes happening.

I would still like to contribute to/work on a new design for the bbPress website, considering that I can’t be of too much help on the coding side of bbPress.

Can’t wait to see the new version.

Merry Christmas everyone!

[nextwave]

Looking for info on top forums using bbpress (most specifically- if Mozilla forums were using it)- and find the links to a sort of cryptic message saying that this moderator has been removed and that the development is slowing:

“The bbPress Showcase has been discontinued.

The removal of Sam Bauers and the halting of bbpress.org 2.0

was a clear and final sign that there is no interest in allowing

bbPress to become a mature, robust program and community.

By now bbPress 1.5 could have been in alpha but instead

bbPress development has been deliberately stagnated,

which should be a very alarming warning to everyone.

In addition, bbShowcase had only six donations in 2009,

which indicated to me there was no interest in my work.

My code will remain on bbpress.org as open source GPL

for those that wish to use it, however I caution you to

consider bbPress’s lack of leadership before continuing to use it.”

What gives?

[Gautam]

The meetup on 23rd December.

“What, just because it’s two days before Christmas we can’t rock the bbPress? In summary: anonymous comments from filosofo and email from photomatt (me) on deck, bug fixes to make things sing, PeteMall will be directly committing fixes, and hajii will be bug gardening.”

Check the conversations here – http://bbpress.org/blog/2009/12/2009-12-23-meetup/

[hpguru]

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/ajaxed-quote/

[lukabernardi]

If you’re referring to https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/quote/

Last update of 2007

and is compatible up to 0.8.1

[lukabernardi]

I am considering using bbpress for a big project, especially for the opportunity to complemented with BuddyPress.

But I am surprised by the note that you can not make quoting a previous post, which virtually every forum engine allows.

Can you tell me how to work around this problem? Or if it’s planned for the next release?

[hpguru]

I move from SMF to phpBB, because my SMF was spammed dayly. phpBB3 is slow and very difficult to use. Then i open bbPress and I like the ease of use, speed and excellent spam protection and basic operations. Now I am more than a year bbPress user, and I’m happy about that.

[Macmenddotcom]

I also used to use SMF but moved away and whilst i am aware of its many add-ons and extra basics that BBpress does not have I have not missed it, and moved away because it became over complex and the move from version 1 to 2 made my site more difficult to run

[kevinjohngallagher]

Dailytalker,

I’m always open to listening to people who have real world examples. What features is BBpress missing that your old SMF forum had?