[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.

[Greg]

I have searched (and searched) to no avail for a solution to this seemingly trivial issue. I may be missing something simple.

What I want to do is log out from an integrated bbPress (RC1) and WPMU (2.7.1 with BP 1.0) installation from within bbPress. The BuddyPress.org forum appears to do exactly this.

What is stopping me is that I can’t generate the WPMU nonce value in order to assemble the logout URL.

(bb_create_nonce() generates a different value, as one would expect)

So I have two questions:

1. Is there any way to do this *without* deep integration?

2. If not, how do I achieve this *with* deep integration?

Any help much appreciated. I’m tearing my hair out on this one.

[Greg]

Thanks Ipstenu. I just reposted that topic and once again it doesn’t appear unless I’m logged in.

The topic is: “Sharing the nonce value with WPMU”. I’m trying to figure out how to call WP logout from within bbPress.

[Greg]

I have searched (and searched) to no avail for a solution to this seemingly trivial issue. I may be missing something simple.

What I want to do is log out from an integrated bbPress (RC1) and WPMU (2.7.1 with BP 1.0) installation from within bbPress. The BuddyPress.org forum appears to do exactly this.

What is stopping me is that I can’t generate the WPMU nonce value in order to assemble the logout URL, that is, I need the NONCEVALUE for…

http://mysite.com/wp-login.php?action=logout&redirect_to=http://mysite.com&_wpnonce=NONCEVALUE

(bb_create_nonce() generates a different value, as one would expect)

So I have two questions:

1. Is there any way to do this *without* deep integration?

2. If not, how do I achieve this *with* deep integration?

Any help much appreciated. I’m tearing my hair out on this one.

[Greg]

Last night I posted here for the first time with my BuddyPress.org username. I can see the post if I am logged in, but not if I’m logged out. It think this is consistent with being assigned the bozo bit in bbPress.

Also, my profile said that the post in question was a reply, where I had clearly started the topic. It said I had started no topics.

On the BuddyPress side, my posts appear both when I am logged in and when I’m not, so I don’t seem to be a bozo on that side.

Am I really a bozo?

[aajkaal]

I completed Step 2 (WordPress integration) successfully. On step 3, I hit Complete Installation and I receive a blank screen. So I change permission on bbpress directory to 777. Now I am back on Step 1. Step 2 with the same values as I gave earlier now fails. So I skip step 2. Fill up step 3 and hit Complete Installation and I receive a blank screen again.

[Arturo]

hi, i’ve a deep-integration, wpmu 2.7.1 + bp 1.0 +bbpress latest trunk i’ve created a theme and integrated it in bbpress, i’ve added wp_head() and wp_footer() to show the buddybar (buddypress admin bar) but the buddybar doesn’t show… i’ve tested the same theme with bbpress 0.9.0.4 and the buddybar is shown without problem.

any idea to fix this problem? thanks for the reply

[mr_swede]

I’ve started to translate bbPress into Swedish, using existing translations from previous versions (pre 0.9.0.3) and found that it is more difficult than expected to find exact translations for some very commonly used forum keywords.

The fact that I’ve been on the web since Mosaic 0.9 did – surprisingly not – make this easier…I’ve searched the web but couldn’t find any generic definitions of these words that tell the actual difference between i.e a post, a discussion and a thread. And what also surprises me is that not any translators (or regular forum members) seem to have asked this before.

• topic
• post
• discussion
• (thread)

I’d appreciate if you (bbPress) forum gurus could clearly define what is actually meant with each keyword above. I included the keyword “thread”, although it isn’t used in bbPress.

I realize that a the keywords represent a certain generic forum hierarchy but the definitions would really help me out to finish off the work I’ve started.

[timskii]

If you upgraded WordPress, the wp-config file may not contain all the keys. Generate them here, and add them to WP. The first 3 of the WP keys are them added to BBPress (via the admin screen):

• WordPress “auth” cookie salt = AUTH_KEY
• WordPress “secure auth” cookie salt = SECURE_AUTH_KEY
• WordPress “logged in” cookie salt = LOGGED_IN_KEY

[timskii]

To clarify my optimization comment slightly:

It may be optimized for memcached, since all those individual pieces of user information rarely change, so all those queries will fall straight to the memory, which becomes ruthlessly efficient. If all the information used on each page is queried together, memcached would fill up with page-specific results, rather than user-specific results: So many individual queries is logically more efficient if you are caching the results of those queries.

There is some logic in this: The structure still works reasonably well on smaller (often shared) setups, where caching can be technically difficult to implement. However BBPress is aiming to support large scale deployment, which is almost inevitably going to mean the use of caching. If you can only write the code optimally for one of those users, optimizing it for someone that can save whole machines in the process, is sensible.

[michael3185]

Yes johnhiler! But without much extra work.

(My ‘Holy Cow inefficiency’ rant was fueled by a late night and beer – I finally got out of the house).

bbPress, and WordPress, need some standards for plugins. Think about it. I know there’s no perfect analogy, but let’s imagine it’s a car. Ford decide to release a twenty-first century car, and it’s damned cool. It has a chassis, steering, wheels and an engine, but everything else is bolt-on. You get to choose how it looks and works. Some people bolt on an aerodynamic shell and a blower, and achieve speeds in excess of 150mph. Others bolt on a big shell and wheels, and lots of seats to carry their kids around. Everyone has a hundred other options. Cool! However, anything you want to bolt on has either a) to be ratified by Ford, or b) noted as a user bolt-on from elsewhere. Ford has a main site/blog/forum where you can see authorised bolt-ons working and links to where to get them, but there are a thousand sites/blogs/forums where you can get ‘unauthorised’ bolt-ons. The world is, as Douglas Adams said, any mollusc you like. But at least you know the Ford authorised bolt-ons are going to work, because they’ve tried them, and all the screws fit the right holes.

Sam and other core developers need to do something similar. Set some standards. Many existing plugins may adhere to those standards already. Many won’t. They should do it across all systems they’ve created. They tell the world that these new standards exist, and that they’ve set a benchmark. The world reports that bbPress/WordPress has set standards other forums haven’t. They don’t need to do much more work, but lickety-split, they’re an authority in the blog/forum world.

When that happens – and it had better happen if the developers want to be taken seriously – users will do a few simple things. They’ll download and install, grab some certified plugins, and go. Sites will appear all over the world with comments like, “I clicked a couple of links, sent the package to my server, added a few certified plugins, and YAY!”

That’s what you folks developing the core of bbPress/Wordpress want.

Isn’t it?