[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

@kevinjohngallagher – I got it from the horse’s mouth. She posted it on her blog and in her Blog Herald post last Friday.

WordPress News, scroll down to bbPress On Fire.

And yeah, the ‘follow the blog’ was partly tongue-in-cheek (I know updates are sparse), but also serious (as it is the best place to get ‘this has changed’ news). The blog will be updated when there’s news to update. And if there are long gaps between posts, well, it’s not a dev-blog. The forums are kind of the dev blog right now.

[kevinjohngallagher]

I write this in response to the growing posts and their ever-increasing angrier responses from moderators, to people who are simply asking for clarification of (mis-)information.

The problem we have, as a community, is that we have no communication nor project management involved with BBpress.

COMMUNICATION

A great example would be:

How many more ALPHA’s before BETA?

_ck_ rightly points out, and then gets angry at the poster, people are constantly asking the same questions. The bit _ck_ misses is that they are not pointless to a lot of people, or indeed one person, even if they are pointless to her. The point that hasn’t seen to be grasped by Sam/Moderators is that have an external facing Trac website that says one thing, when another is true, which is why people are asking the same questions over and over.

Instead of getting angry at people, why not change the date on Trac?? Even if you put it at 1st Jan 2010, it’s at least in the future and closer to being realistic than 1.0Beta 2 months ago.

I brought this up in October, and then again in December, and now again in February, but people who are new to this project or maybe not as involved ask _ck_ get their information from the website; but this info has been wrong for over 5 months. Which is why people are asking for clarification!

If you give people wrong/bad/out of date information, you have to accept that they will ask questions about it on the forum. It’s been the nature of humans throughout history, and we’re not going to change simply because it’s BBpress (sadly).

Given that the issue could be fixed by a BBpress person (not sure about user roles here so don’t want to presume that a forum mod could do it or if we need to wait for Sam); maybe we should stop being rude to people and fix it?

<u>A further example:</u>

It’s great that _ck_ knows that alpha 7 will break her plugins; but what about everyone else? Where is the blog post? Where is the forum post by Sam? Where is the sticky? Where is the announcement? Etc.

After much searching it turns out that 3 weeks ago _ck_ made a post about it, which has been off the front page of the forums section for the last 15 days. Brilliantly meaning that if you didn’t read the BBpress forums for a 5 day period at the start of February for any reason, then you won’t know about these massive changes. At the risk of appearing sarcastic, does anyone else think that maybe this should be the sort of thing we should Sticky/announce/keep on front page? Shouldn’t this sort of thing come from Sam?

But regardless it just re-emphasises the fact that communication about BBpress is close to non-existant.

TRAC

Devs and Moderators tell us to use Trac, and then are surprised that people are confused about the roadmap saying that Beta comes out 01/08/08 .

Either update Trac so that people don’t get confused, or inform people in some another way (which is a little redundant as that is what the Trac roadmap is for).

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

It somewhat goes hand in hand with the communication aspect, but as any developer knows, rushing head first into coding with no long term view quickly becomes fruitless.

As a community, and i’m in no way saying that Sam answers to us (really want to make that clear), we have no freaking idea what the heck is going on at any given time. We’re either given an ever changing answer by a moderator, or we’re told that Sam will tell us (like the voice behind the curtain), or we’re left with the (wrong) info on the website.

Every change comes out of no-where.

We have no idea what the short, medium and long terms goals are.

As much as this software is ‘free’, anyone planning to use it on a website at least wants to plan a little in advance.

It’s very difficult to want to help/take pride/give back to an open source project when we’re constantly told “it’s ready when it’s ready stop asking” – and in fact shows a total lack of project management and control.

Who runs the BBpress project?

Do they know/can they answer:

– how many scheduled man hours until alpha 7?

– are people assigned to work on it, or have they been moved elsewhere?

– what is the testing time on alpha 7?

– how long and we holding open bug acceptance for alpha 7?

– what is the due date for alpha 7?

– what is the likelihood of hitting that date?

– what are the dependant factors?

– what impact does alpha 7 have on existing installations?

– have the testers been informed of this?

– have the contributors been informed of this?

– what potential conflicts are there between current versions and alpha 7?

I’m not specifically looking for answers btw, as I said before Sam doesn’t answer to us, but I’m not sure I believe that ANYONE related with this project can answer those questions, and that is really really worrying.

IT IS FREE – THEREFORE IT IS OK.

Free is good, free we like.

Free means we accept bugs.

Free means we accept it’s not ideal.

Free means we know we wont get a 100% fit to what we need.

Free doesn’t mean we accept no communication.

Free doesn’t mean we accept what communication we get being wrong.

Free doesn’t mean we accept no management.

Free doesn’t mean we should get slapped down for asking perfectly legitimate and reasonable questions.

Free doesn’t mean we should accept instant yet wide sweeping changes.

Free doesn’t mean we should accept a total lack of respect.

AUTOMATTIC IS NOT A COMMERCIAL COMPANY

It is.

No, really… it is, so can we please stop saying that it’s not. Sam, while a loveable rogue to be sure (and he’s very cute in his picture), he is not fucking Ghandi – he does this for a wage.

Automattic is not building BBpress out of the goodness of their hearts to save all the wee orphans of the world, they’re a company making a profit and paying people’s wages.

Lets drop the humanitarian line when someone makes a good point and the moderators want to slap it down, eh? Or am I wrong, is BBpress ending world hunger as we speak? No? ok, maybe lets stop this one then. Just a thought.

HOW TO FIX THIS.

At the risk of opening up an old wound, I made a list at Christmas time (the oh so fun Facebook thread).

Either pause development on BBpress 1.0alpha7 for a week, or engage someone else to do it but:

<u>Fix the website. </u> Seriously, spend time going through each static page (there are 20 of them) removing all the bogus/wrong/out of date information. Some pages are fine, some are really really out of date. Given how much has changed with BBpress since WP2.5 came out, if you haven’t updated a page since that time then you know it’s wrong before reading.

<u>Blog more. </u> Not in a twitter “I am eating an apple” way, but you’ve made 5 posts in over 6 months (and 3 of them were within 3 days of each other). That development blog is our window into the BBpress development. It says “hey, this project ain’t dead”; instead all it does now is say “we released this bit of software on this date”. It’s not a blog, there’s no info other than release dates of software that don’t work anymore (for the most part).

<u>Extend / Plugin section. </u> This drastically needs an overhaul. There needs to be an option to filter out plugins that either don’t work or haven’t been updated to the latest release. Lets be honest, some of these plugins are 2 years old, and as soon as you click into them that’s the first stat you see.

<u>Download section. </u> Kinda/probably/should/maybe say that if you download the latest version it won’t work with a wordpress install form the last 9 months. Even though it’s from the same company. And it says it does work in the About page. And says it again on the Integration page. Yeah, we should probably write the truth somewhere or people will keep asking…

<u>Trac. </u> Lets update Trac. If someone has an understanding of the project to the level that they can answer the Project Manager 101 questions above, then why not put some of that info into Trac? I’m confident (though it’s just my opinion) that people are more motivated to fix bugs if we know there are X outstanding before the next alpha, rather than a huge list that has be fixed in an unknown amount of time.

<u>Development documentation. </u> A tough one this, and time consuming. I get that, I really do. But it makes helping out really difficult. As someone with rusty PHP coding skills (I‘ve been a BA far too long), I find Navigating bbpress to be a pain, and while I understand wordpress comparisons aren’t favourable, documentation makes wordpress editing 1000 times easier.

<u>Give us an overview. </u> Sounds very simple, and most PM’s have an overview list for each project anyway (usually on a power point to fob directors off), but it would make life easier. Many of us still don’t know what ‘features’ are standard with BBpress and which will only be available via plugin. Many of us don’t know what features are intended on being added, or what direction BBpress is going to go in. These aren’t bugs, we can’t add them to Trac, but many good points have been raised on these forums in the past – and I don’t think it’s right of us to assume you missed them or have ignore them, simply because there’s no communication.

Last bug not least…

Any chance we could have a reigning in chat with some Moderators? It’s great that they give up their time to reply here, and help the community, but (and I don’t know if it’s just someone having a bad day) the comments are getting way more aggressive/argumentative/absolutist.

It’s not that the standard answers aren’t wearing thin ofc, it’s just that we know the answer is going to be:

• It’s free.
• Sam’s too busy to pass on info.
• Blame Matt.
• It’s free.
• Stop asking. It’ll be ready when it’s ready.
• It’s free.
• Automattic are here to save us all and do not make any moey at all ever and everyone works for free I loves them – please ignore the $29 million they got which included the development of BBpress in the pitch.
• Go to trac.
• Don’t believe Trac.
• Sam’s too busy to keep you lot updated.
• Microsoft.
• It’s free.

That’s said a little tongue in cheek, and I hope it caused no offence, but while the moderators are clearly trying to do a great job (and we thank them), rarely do we get answers or constructive conversation when we talk about things like this. We’re shot down very quickly that we dared to have a different view point, and then given one of the standard answers that blame someone else or that it’s free.

WE WANT TO HELP.

Anyone who takes the time to hang around this forum sees we want to help. Anyone who takes the time to write on the forum wants to support BBpress.

If you’re the only developer on BBpress, or the person making almost all of the plugins, or the moderator who slams anyone who asks a question: please let us help.

We can’t just rock up, roll up our sleeves and stick our hand up a cow’s butt (an old farming joke – sorry). We need some direction, we need to be able to ask questions, we need information. Once we know what stage BBpress is at, we can help in taking it forward – with you.

But right now, all we can do is right posts like these every 2 months.

[John James Jacoby]

Yeah some of my users haven’t updated their profiles, and BuddyPress doesn’t recognize them until either they do, or I force the info (which I will probably do.)

@TeddyC, it took me installing WordPressMU 4 times before I followed the instructions correctly, and I’d recommend not doing it on Valentines weekend so your girlfriend doesn’t hate you for a few days, but otherwise I think it went as smoothly as it could considering I migrated 200 users from WordPress.org/bbPress over to MU. There’s a few places where I had to trial and error my way through the multi-blog switchover and the URL re-writing still isn’t perfect (categories and postnames are broken?) and I had to manually dump the DB and replace all the directory references for all of the uploaded media.

Otherwise the rest was just tweaking and tinkering. Lots of it.

I’ve got the forums FULLY integrated now with BuddyPress, so single account access, cookies, and users are able to post to group forums from within the group itself, and vice versa. It’s a neat little bridge and I rather like that it’s all playing nice. Hopefully upgrading to 1.0 or new alpha’s doesn’t TOTALLY break everything too badly, although I anticipate that it probably will. Yay!

I am going to be using BuddyPress to do a small social networking site for a non profit, that is going to be incorporating some school related content, so I will let you know how that goes and be sure to stay in touch as it progresses. I’ll link back to it here if we decide to incorporate bbPress.

[deadlyhifi]

$forum_one_topics = $bbdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $bbdb->topics WHERE forum_id = $forum_id AND topic_status = 0 AND topic_sticky = 0 ORDER BY topic_id DESC LIMIT $limit OFFSET $offset");

updated to leave out sticky posts from the second loop (added AND topic_sticky = 0 to query).

If you leave out ‘$forum_id = 1;’ it will work on multiple forums.

I’ve done this so that my front page summary shows latest active posts, but my specific forum pages list by topic order.

[_ck_]

Top 1000 gets updated with Top 100, sometime in April, maybe end of March if I have time, not before then. Look for the Firefox 3.1 release date as a guide since 3.1beta has a bug I need to wait for them to fix.

[hpguru]

Hi!

When the top 1000 list is updated?

[_ck_]

Let’s put it this way, if you have decent income from a forum of that size, you should not waste another minute your time (or anyone else’s) and just pay for vbulletin and the extra hardware it will need at that size (dedicated mysql and email servers). Seriously, it’s the best for a reason, but you will have to pay for everything once you go down that path, addons, etc.

If you are trying to cut corners and do it on the cheap, bbPress 0.9 is lightweight enough to handle it (wordpress.org has many times the traffic you do) though a dedicated mysql server can always help, and keep in mind bbPress has no caching plugins available yet. The money you save will be spent in hours of customization and tuning and creating your own fixes for problems.

You can always turn to lighttpd or nginx if you know your stuff and have days to fiddle with it or the almost instant installing litespeed, if you want an apache replacement that will double the capacity of your server.

The only cloud on the horizon is bbPress 1.0 as I estimate it in some cases will be roughly 30-50% slower than 0.9 (with still no caching plugins) and at this time roughly half of my plugins will not work with it (and won’t for quite some time, assume the end of 2009 at the soonest).

After 1.0 stabilizes and someone ports WP Super Cache to it, that will change the picture again but that kind of caching only helps visitors that aren’t logged in.

Oh and bbPress isn’t going to solve your search problems. It will only make it worse. bbPress’s search is completely non-indexed, and has virtual no options. My Super Search plugin might eventually cache searches but that’s not going to solve the problem of 1000 users searching for different things at once. I mentioned http://sphinxsearch.com a few months back and amazingly they are now using it on wordpress.com so there is hope that one day there will be a plugin for wordpress/bbpress to use it for searches on larger sites which will completely solve the performance problem.

Your groups of forums will require bbPress 1.0 and the downside of that again is half the plugins for bbPress 0.9 will not work with it. If you do install 1.0, don’t install anything more than 1.0 alpha 5 to use with my plugins.

ps. the top 100 list hasn’t been updated in 90 days and many of those forums are much bigger now – next update will be sometime after Firefox 3.1 is released

[comput]

Hi,

1st of all, thanks for this screen-cast.

I have followed your screen-cast and succeeded with integrating WP 2.7.1 and BB 1.0 alpha 6 in different directories.

http://mydom.com/wp/ (WordPress)

http://mydom.com/board/ (bbPress)

My issue is that logging in and out is working fine as long as WP handles log-in and out! And not the other way when logging out from BB.

Issue 1:

When I log-in to my WP and go to BB log-in works fine, also the other way from BB to WP.

But if I log out fron BB and go back to WP – I’m logged out but the META link is not updated and WP thinks I’m still logged in (which I’m not!)

How can I make the log-out work through BB aswell.

Issue 2:

Registering through BB gives me no role inside WP!

I have bbPress integration plug-in (wp) installed and everything else is working fine! Roles are made inside BB-WP integration just like in the screen-cast.

Can someone please help!

Thanks.

[elfman2]

“Different people like blogs than like forums, and topics in blogs rarely are formatted in the way you would for a forum. Your mileage may vary, of course, but a beautifully crafted blog post, in my experience, is a tl;dr post on a forum.” – Ipstenu

That’s a good point Ipstenu, but it’s being managed already. Here are some examples of political blogs on the left and the right linking forums to blogs:

SALON (political left)

– Blog posts are presented like forum topics here: http://open.salon.com/cover.php?view_sort=recent

– The authors’ blogs are listed here: http://open.salon.com/people.php

Pajamas Media (political right)

– Blog posts are presented like forum topics here: http://pajamasmedia.com/

– The authors’ blogs are listed here: http://pajamasmedia.com/pajamasxpress/

I don’t know how much of that’s developed in house or updated manually, but I can’t imagine a better system for both bloggers an forum members.

tl;dr? That’s fine. The bloggers won’t suffer if most of the forum members don’t read a post that they’d have never known existed anyway, and the forum won’t suffer from a few long topics being posted to a list of relevant chatter.

Off the top of my head, I can’t come up with an example of where blogs and forums that are focused on an identical narrow subject would integrate poorly. The focus just has to be well defined, or at least it can’t vary between the blogs and the forum. If it does, direct the incompatible blogs to a new forum (or to no forum). That’s just part of community management.

[C Bog]

as far as i can see, by studying the code, wordpress has introduced a salt for hashing the passwords since 2.5

bbpress (my version is 0.9.0.4) has not updated it’s functions to include this salt.

the alpha release of bbpress 1.0 seems to take care of this problem, but the file structure, as far as i can see is completely different from the older versions, so a simple copy & paste wouldn’t do.

maybe the stable 1.0 release will take care of this issue, but since then (i don’t recommend using the alpha version on production web sites) i will try to modify the pluggable.php file of bbpress 0.9.0.4 in order to allow the usage of salts.

i’ll be back these days with further details.

[elfman2]

“I’m assuming you’re talking about something like this:

“Joe and Jane have blogs on your MU site.

Joe posts ‘My life’ in Joe’s Blog.

Jane posts ‘My dog’ in Jane’s Blog.

Both posts appear in the forum ‘Blogs'”

______________________

Ipstenu, Yes,that would be a good start. Better yet, the bloggers should be able to select what forum their blog posts also appear in.

I’m not sure if two blog posts rarely having the same title in a forum would be a big problem. I’m guessing that posts are indexed by some kind of messageID and that I could post two topics to this forum with the same title now, but I haven’t looked at the data structure.

I agree that copying posts from blogs to forums and back would be a lousy hack. Ideally they should share the same pool of messages in the database and just present alternate views of them, but I’d settle for such a hack for now. (I’m not a WP or even a PHP guy by the way).

The purpose of this is to solve the blog readership “chicken or egg” problem. Why regularly spend hours creating exceptional blog post when there are so few readers? Why read a blog when it’s so rarely updated or the author spends so little time on the posts?

This system would allow people who typically read forums (like this one) to scan through both the forum’s post and related blog posts. And it would give new bloggers an audience drawn from both forum readers and readers of other blogs on the same site.

There’s a lot more to this, but that’s the basics.

[deadlyhifi]

in topic.php in your theme folder use

<?php bb_topic_admin(); ?> instead of the ‘<?php topic_delete_link(); ?> <?php topic_close_link(); ?> <?php topic_sticky_link(); ?>

<?php topic_move_dropdown(); ?>’ (line 55)

Come to think of it I may have updated a core file.

and topic-tags.php becomes

<div id="topic-tags">

<p><?php _e('Tags:'); ?></p>



<?php if ( bb_get_topic_tags() ) : ?>



<?php bb_list_tags(); ?>



<?php else : ?>



<p><?php printf(__('No <a href="%s">tags</a> yet.'), bb_get_tag_page_link() ); ?></p>



<?php endif; ?>



<?php tag_form(); ?>



</div>

(just replace the entire page)

This does break the improvements I suggested in https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/list-all-tags#post-23142 though. Although I have edited the core files (which is not encouraged) to bring back the functionality of showing who posted a tag to moderators.

[_ck_]

The spammers figured out how to defeat the old Human Test so I updated it:

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

and I will be updating it again later this month to make it even harder

[Malice]

pagerank is only updated every several months.

[_ck_]

Of course things will break when you use the alpha (which you failed to mention).

I’ve updated it to 0.0.2 to deal with the mess in bbPress 1.0

[_ck_]

Um, forum-moderators does exactly what you want, but it probably needs to be updated for 0.9 and 1.0

I have an unreleased plugin called “extra privileges” that does something like what you are asking but it won’t be released anytime soon.

You can see how filters on bb_current_user_can work by studying this mini-plugin I wrote to allow users to delete their own posts

function delete_own_post($retvalue, $capability, $args) {

global $bb_current_user, $bb_post;

if ($capability=="delete_post" && $bb_current_user->ID && $bb_post && $bb_post->post_id  &&  $bb_post->post_id ==intval($args[1]) &&

$bb_post->poster_id && $bb_post->poster_id==$bb_current_user->ID && bb_current_user_can( 'edit_post', $bb_post->post_id) {return true;}   // lots and lots of double checks

return $retvalue;

}

add_filter('bb_current_user_can', 'delete_own_post',10,3);

or simplier version:

function delete_own_post($retvalue, $capability, $args) {

if ($capability=="delete_post") {return bb_current_user_can( 'edit_post', $args[1]);}

return $retvalue;

}

add_filter('bb_current_user_can', 'delete_own_post',10,3);

[ilo]

I fixed it, turns out i had not updated my config file from my wordpress upgrade so i was using an old config file, when changing i just edited the file and added the secret key setting and it seems to be working great with 0.9

[deadlyhifi]

When unbanning people (setting them back to ‘member’) it states their new role within the admin, but when they try and log in they are still banned.

Manually re-setting their password solves the issue.

I presume this is a simple issue of the role not being updated properly. The problem does not exist when changing from ‘inactive’.

In 0.9.04 this is. Not tested it in 1.0 yet.

[John James Jacoby]

Just updated a few little things.

There’s stuff that still needs tweaking, but otherwise I consider this a fully integrated install with custom template and heavily modified via plug-ins.

[_ck_]

Do not use the Private Forums plugin, it has not been updated in awhile and has bugs.

Use my Hidden Forums plugin instead. The code above is not sufficient in itself.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

I’d say try the nightly build ( https://bbpress.org/nightly-builds/bbpress-latest.zip ) but I’m not really sure when that’s updated anymore…

The SVN is open to be downloaded by anyone.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

I opened that a half a month ago But thanks, _ck_! It works now. I updated my ticket but … why isn’t it picking that up from the default template?

[Ganzuelo]

I just received this error on the install screen just after it tells you it cannot find a config file. I changed my old one to config.old.php (received error) then to bb-config.old.php. (received error)

Fatal error: Call to undefined function backpress_get_option() in /nfs/c03/h04/mnt/57391/domains/willclan4food.net/html/bbpress/bb-includes/backpress/functions.core.php on line 412

I then just had a funny feeling so I just changed the file name back to bb-config.php and when I went to my forums it said I needed a update.. updated and all seems well.

[pulk99]

ok, this problem is now back, after I updated to wp 2.7 and bbpress 0.9.0.3.

now my feed doesn’t validate because of the date:

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

*

line 18, column 39: pubDate must be an RFC-822 date-time: Fr, 02 Jan 2009 10:57:20 +0000 (35 occurrences) [help]

<pubDate>Fr, 02 Jan 2009 10:57:20 +0000</pubDate></blockqoute>

and the rss widget doesn’t update again with new forum postings.

[John James Jacoby]

Seems maybe the core should be updated to work around this eh?