bbPress.org

Hi Kari,

With both the weekend and a major community summit, the past few days have been pretty slow around here.

This is a hard question to answer, because it depends on your forums and how you have them setup as private.

There are also security implications to consider. For example, if your forums are only for logged in users, redirecting to a login page vs. showing a 404 hints to hackers that something exists vs. it not existing, which incentivizes the hunt.

I usually try to recommend that forums use the login widgets, or otherwise have some always-available login form to use instead. That way private forums can still 404 for non-logged-in users, without the redirect hint.

If you do want to redirect anyways, you’ll need a custom plugin to modify the way bbPress works.

Unhook bbp_forum_enforce_private and bbp_forum_enforce_hidden, and write your own equivalent functions to use bbp_redirect() rather than bbp_set_404().

if there is supposed to be a redirect when someone isn’t logged in

No. When inaccessible pages are requested, a 404 is returned.

I want to prevent non logged-in users from viewing this 404 page because it has a list of all the pages within my website, and I need to keep that accessible only to logged-in users.

I’ve created a Trac ticket to get more development discussion on the idea here:

https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3118