[dss]

Good point, I checked, and it does. Also, it is the same as the one’s I’ve pasted into the bb config as well.

I installed bbpress before this was a feature.

I wonder if I need to add this manually to the database?

[Sam Bauers]

WordPress is planning on implementing a labeling system to identify “canonical” plugins. I believe the rating of these will be community driven. It’s early days on that one, but I think a user driven approach would be the only legitimate way to go.

Thanks for the MySQL query testing above. I’ll look into what’s possible without bloating the cache objects.

People might be interested to know that in Automattic’s mix of bbPress usage we use no external object cacheing (like memcached) or page caching. This is with both 0.9 and 1.0 versions.

[Sam Bauers]

Display names won’t be added to the 0.9 branch.

[aetorre]

I tried these patchs. bb-moderation-hold doesn’t work properly and development seems to be discontinued. I searched similar functionality in other plugins but I didn’t find anything.

Any idea?

[Greg]

Thanks Michael. Via that plugin I found this one: https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/display-name/

Don’t know why it didn’t come up in my original search. It’s a bit dated, but perhaps it will do the trick.

[quiltingwithmoxie]

I finally got bbPress 1.0 RC1 installed on a new WPMU site…that was an ordeal. I had to install as un-integrated. I then installed the integration plugin but now I cannot log in to either my WPMU or my bbPress. I tried a password recovery but that did nothing. HELP! LOL

Should I change the “SITECOOKIEPATH” that Detective is referring to? What can I try now that I can’t even log in?

Blessings,

Wendy

[johnhiler]

I think the latest .9 version is 0.9.0.4?

https://trac.bbpress.org/report/2

The only list of function names that I know of was pulled together by _ck_:

http://bbshowcase.org/reference/

[michael3185]

I love the plugins folks have created, and would like to try creating a simple one of my own. Thing is, I have no idea what functions calls are available in bbPress 0.9.0.5, and can’t find any documentation. Is there a list of function names and parameters somewhere, or do I have to trawl through a thousand files and learn the hard way..?

As an aside, I’ve noticed a couple of comments regarding using bbPress stand-alone. I do for my clients, and myself. Never installed WordPress, and don’t need it. In their working world, WordPress is little different to static web pages. bbPress, on the other hand, invites comments and discussion, which is what they need.

[michael3185]

Hi reboot. I saw a thread somewhere about this, and mention of a plugin for 1.0 which turns OFF display names. From what I remember, they can be used to spoof Admin, etc. Can’t find it now, but I think the plugin was called disable-display-name. Might be worth a look.

[quiltingwithmoxie]

Grrr I tried the Download 1.0 RC.zip version and that didn’t work either. This time no user info appeared, it took my info, acted as if it was working, generated an email with no password but nothing really happened. Here is the error this time:

Forum could not be created!

Referrer is OK, beginning installation…

>>> Setting up custom user table constants

Step 1 – Creating database tables

>>> Database is already installed!!!

Step 2 – WordPress integration (optional)

>>> WordPress address (URL): http://quiltingwithmoxie.com/

>>> Blog address (URL): http://quiltingwithmoxie.com/blog/

>>> WordPress cookie keys set.

>>> WordPress “auth” cookie salt set from input.

>>> WordPress “secure auth” cookie salt set from input.

>>> WordPress “logged in” cookie salt set from input.

>>> User database table prefix: wp_

>>> WordPress MU primary blog ID: 1

Step 3 – Site settings

>>> Site name: Quilting with Moxie Guild

>>> Site address (URL): http://quiltingwithmoxie.com/guild/

>>> From email address: –snip–

>>> Key master created

>>>>>> Username: admin

>>>>>> Email address: –snip–

>>>>>> Password:

>>> Description: Just another bbPress community

>>> Forum could not be created!

>>> Key master email sent

There were some errors encountered during installation!

What now?

Blessings,

Wendy

[Greg]

One of the nice things about bbPress 1.0 is that it supports display names. This seems pretty important – you don’t want the names to look different in different parts of the site (I have bbPress integrated with BuddyPress 1.0). I guess one could limit the WPMU/BP side of things to usernames, but that seems like a step backwards.

On the other hand, bbPress 0.9.0.x is very stable and reportedly quite a bit more efficient, so I’d like to stick with it until 1.0 gets there (we have a few thousand users).

Have you found a way to do display names using 0.9.0.x? I see mention of a plugin, but I can’t find it in the extend section.

[michael3185]

@johnhiler – I guess you’re not alone in not wanting an ‘authority’, though all I mean by the word is those creating and maintaining bbPress being seen as an authority in ‘the outside world’, as opposed to ‘the inner world’ of bbPress forum users. It’s already being done in a way, internally, by us getting to know who we trust most. Perhaps I’m letting my enthusiasm for a great product carry me away..?

Maybe just this thread and the comments from various members is enough in itself, as like any other, it raises awareness. For myself, I already have a few names in my head of those I trust when it comes to plugins, which are an essential part of bbPress. _ck_’s comments are funny in a way, about only writing plugins for fun or to show what can be done, hers(?) turning out to be among the very best! Perhaps I am barking up the wrong tree, and it should just be left as it is; to be fun, a hacking ground for those who want to hack, with gems coming up here and there from the talented coders. As you say _ck_, it spreads the workload and encourages new input, perhaps in ways that just wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t Open Source.

In any case, I’m grateful to those who invest time and effort into extending bbPres. My needs are few, as almost everything I want exists already. I’d like user roles in a stable version, and may have to go the way another thread suggests, and edit a file to add my own. I’d also like a sticky topic sort order plugin, but don’t have the skills to create it (yet). Tell you what I will do though, regardless of any standards for plugins, etc. I’m going to advertise bbPress personally; word of mouth, on my sites, etc.

Returning to my original thought; “bbPress v1’s eventual release”… I’ll have user roles when that version is considered stable enough for general use. For now, 0.9.0.5, completely free, is excellent.

[johnhiler]

@Michael3185 – Personally I wouldn’t trust a top-down authority to validate plugins. But some sort of bottoms up thing, I could get behind.

But if you want to take the lead on it, you could draft a proposal and post it in a new thread! Maybe some other users would be into it.

[_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.

[_ck_]

People don’t write software to see their name in lights.

I think the point is being missed by some who haven’t kept up with bbPress history.

bbPress wasn’t invented by Matt to create a better forum for the masses.

It was invented to serve the needs of Automattic needing (faster) support forums.

It just happens to be open source so others can improve it, write plugins for it, etc.

You’ll never have “certified plugins”, that would have no useful purpose to Automattic. On the flip side I would never have written a single plugin if I thought it was being held to some kind of standard, I wrote them for “fun”, to see if I could do it, or to show others it was possible.

Releasing a product as open source is a way for business to get additional labor on their products for free by encouraging adoption. That’s not a criticism, that’s how it works in general. Matt used code from other open source projects so he’s motivated to also share his projects as open source.

Sure there are some projects that are made from scratch to try to serve the greater good. But there’s no reward for that, you can never please more than a handful of people with whatever you try to do, given how many different opinions and experiences there are in any community.

Some of the wishes expressed in this topic were expressed last year, the year before that and will be said next year and the year after that. Don’t use bbPress if any of those issues are important to you, because WordPress has been around for six+ years and it still has those issues and always will.

[_ck_]

Changed files for the curious:

https://trac.bbpress.org/changeset?old_path=tags%2F0.9.0.4&old=1898&new_path=tags%2F0.9.0.5&new=2131

[michael3185]

Yeah, I use NightGunner’s PM, and it’s a gem. As to the legal side, I know so-called civilisation has become litigation mad, but you just put it in a nutshell yourself; “bbPress Certified”. If it’s in quotes, it’s ‘a quote from someone’, and not legally binding as a testimonial (at least here in the UK, which is why all our adverts are wrapped in quotes). I’m sure with the millions of dollars Automatic were given recently, they could easily get advice on making it litigation safe too.

You know, it doesn’t have to be much of a big thing from this end, but it’d inspire confidence in ‘the outside world’, by which I mean those who want Open Source software, but not problems, as they’re not coders or forum hounds. On the inside it could be very simple indeed, ie;

1. Is the code neat and readable? 1 star.

2. Uses the the proper hooks and function calls? +1 star.

3. Works instantly with the current ‘safe’ release? + 1 star.

4. Doesn’t affect, and isn’t affected by, other plugins? +1 star.

etc.

User ratings could go alongside it as an extra, and us forum hounds can carry on as usual. However – and it’s a big however in the eyes of the outside world – the creators of bbPress (and their other systems) gain massive kudos, and therefore, a larger user base. Imagine a press release;

“Sammy Surfer, creator of burblePress said today; We’re into the next generation of forum software. What we’ve realised is that most folks want it to run straight out of the box. We have a compact and powerful core engine, and are announcing our new certification system for plugins. Plugins allow users to develop additional functionality, and while we can’t guarantee code others produce, we do look at and rate plugins. In fact, plugins are key to making burblePress do what you want it to do, so get involved!”

Etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Funny, don’t you think, that no Open Source forum producers have had the balls to do this yet..? But I’ll tell you this: the first one who does will have their name in lights. Do M$ produce amazing, unbeatable code which rules the world? Do they hell. Have they grabbed the world’s attentions and millions of users simply because they set their own standards? You bet your damned underpants. I hope Sam reads this, and throws his own undies to the wind.

[johnhiler]

Yah plugins aren’t at the plug and play point yet, sadly.

Slapping a name like “bbPress Certified” on it is begging for legal problems. But it might be neat to have a system where individual users could say, “Works For Me” and list their version number. If I saw that five people with 0.9.0.4 had installed a plugin I was looking at, that would give me a lot of comfort (and avoid the legal and logistical problems of having Automattic review each plugin).

In a similar vein, it’d be great if there were a way for a site mod to put some kind of warning on exploited plugins. It really pains me is that plugins with widely reported security problems don’t have a warning on them:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/security-warning-stop-using-private-messaging-plugin

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/private-messages/

That said, NightGunner5 wrote a great substitute plugin without the security hole… and it’s quickly become more popular. So maybe the issue is less urgent than I had thought…

[michael3185]

Fixed. And thanks for all your hard work Sam.

[edit]

Hmm… After the slight rant, I realised that theme files may always have the potential to be ‘broken’, as you might upgrade those too. I guess there isn’t a theme-proof way of upgrading bbPress..?

I have to say that this is by far the best forum package I’ve tried – and I’ve tried them all. It’s lightweight and fast, it just works, there are great plugins available to provide features my users need, plus superb and friendly support in the bbPress forums. On those days when you wonder why on earth you do it Sam, remember that nothing else comes close, and countless users out here are grateful. (You’re helping new mums and their babies in Lincoln, UK, do you know? The forum is only just up, but the 45+ members will soon be online and using it, and there’s going to be a press release too. I’ll see if I can wangle a mention of bbPress! Have a glance at http://mbforum.letsdoo.org and their main site at http://www.maternitybuddy.org.uk)

[michael3185]

I can see what you mean, but I don’t think it’s going the wrong way at all, and it’s not contrary to Open Source. (Open Source is not another name for ‘A Flaming Mess’). It’s common sense. It needs to be implemented in an easy-going way, but be there as a label so users know that plugins have been looked at and given a thumbs-up by those in the know. And those in the know don’t have to create a huge system and lots more work for themselves either. They’re already glancing at plugins from what I’ve been told. All that’s needed are some simple guidelines as a standard.

As I said, the current user rating system is useless. I downloaded a bunch of 5 Star plugins and they crashed badly. Since then, I ignore the star ratings. I also look at the code before installing a plugin. If it looks like granny’s hair in a tornado, I dump it. Anyone who writes code without caring how it reads is unlikely to write code that works. You either care, or you don’t.

Bear in mind that I’m talking about end users here, not forum fiends who love to delve into things (and I’ve quickly become one of those!) Picture someone like my voluntary sector clients, and others, who want to download, install, and play. They don’t want hassle, and they don’t want to hang around forums looking for fixes to plugins which provide functions they need. They want the star system to mean something, and they want the people who created the software in the first place to authorise plugins in some way.

It doesn’t have to be Big Brother. For those who aren’t coders or forum hounds, it just has to work. having something like ‘bbPress Certified’ or whatever, would give some idea as to whether it’s going to plug and play, or whether you plug and pray. Sadly, at the moment, the latter is more likely. Just read through the forums! (And yes, I very much do respect the time and effort people put into developing plugins).

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Simply calling plugins ‘bbPress Certified’ will make the world assume that those behind bbPress are an authority who have the power to authorise things.

I think you’re going at this the wrong way. WordPress doesn’t do this, and frankly if such an effort was to come down upon our fair bbsoftware, it would HAVE to come from the Big Brother that is Automattic if it was going to stick at all. Is it a good idea? Yeah, but it feels almost contrarywise to the tenents of open source. That may just be me, and I’ll need to re-read the GPLs for WP and BB. Either way, it does end up being a weird feeling to think that someone has review plugins. It’s going to be work, no matter what, and much like the recent themes switch (where paid themes got the boot) someone’s going to get pissed off… Meh. I like the idea, I worry about implementation.

[johnhiler]

Yah, chrishajer nailed it!

One of the weirdest adjustments for me using bbPress was figuring out the difference between posts and topics:

* A topic is what bbPress calls the entire thread/discussion.

* A post is what bbPress calls each individual piece of content in the topic – whether it be the first post creating the thread, or a comment on it.

So for example, a newly created thread would count as one topic and one post. If someone comments on it, then it becomes one topic with two posts.

If you ever want to calculate the number of comments per topic, you have to subtract out the first post from the number of posts. So for example, suppose a thread/topic had 12 posts. That actually means that it has one post that started it off, and 11 comments.

At least, that’s how I parse all of this! Good luck with the translations!

[timskii]

Sometimes I end up digging new users out of the spam queue, who have done nothing more than post half a dozen links to one of several topic-related websites. Akismet gets them, even though I know the domain they are linking to is entirely legitimate in the context of the forum. This is a specific problem for new users, so creating a filter based on user role or posting history does not solve the problem.

I’ve started looking at whitelisting domains within links: A link to a whitelisted domain will always be considered legitimate, regardless of the number of links, or proportion of the post containing links.

The BBPress plugin does not support this. Probably because the Akismet API doesn’t appear to support it: One submits the whole post content as comment_content, and waits for a result. No white-listing options I could see.

The crudest possible solution is to hack an escape clause into bb_ksd_check_post(), which simply says “if post content contains a whitelisted domain reference, skip Akismet”. Works right up until the point at which the spammer sees the pattern…

My next idea was to extract all the whitelisted links from the content, send the rest to Akismet, and then put the links back into whatever is sent back. Somehow. Simplest method was probably converting whitelisted anchors into comments, but I’m not sure that Akismet will step over comments. Does it?

Or I could just disable Akismet and find another solution.

So, I thought I’d ask here, if anyone has a clever way to whitelist certain domains?

[michael3185]

Yeah, I was a bozo the other day due to including a URL. I’m still a bozo today, though not in the eyes of bbPress.

[chrishajer]

Here’s my take on it, but I’m no guru.

• A topic is a collection of posts.
• A post is a single entry related to a topic. A post is also referred to as a reply.
• A discussion is a topic (I believe the two are synonymous.)
• A thread on some boards is a topic on bbPress.
• A forum is a collection of topics related to a subject.
• A bbPress installation can be a group of forums.