[w3215]

Using bbpress registration for my forum, can anyone–including people without any wordpress account–register?

I would assume so and hope so, but I saw that this bbpress-powered forum requires a wordpress account for registration.

[Robin W]

bbpress just uses wordpress registration – so yes a wordpress subscriber account is needed – is there an issue with this ?

[w3215]

Thank you for your reply.

Here is the issue: I am considering using bbpress as an important part of a site that anyone can use. Imagine it like stackoverflow, discussion sites run by discourse, or practically any web app–users register directly on the site without need to have an underlying account somewhere else. It seems to me that if someone wanted to build a site like these–entirely separate from a wordpress blog– bbpress would be a good place to start. (Please let me know if you disagree.)

So I will require a way for anyone who wants to use my site–wordpress user or not–to register and use the site. One of the great things about bbpress is that out of the box it covers so much and it has been around long enough to be thoroughly tested; so I had hoped I could just use bbpress’s registration, without having to configure a separate registration process.

In particular, I like how bbpress generates a user profile page that summarizes a user’s activity in a simple way.

Is there a way to allow non-wordpress users to register, while still utilizing bbpress’s tools like its user profile page? Maybe a bbpress plugin?

I know there are general wordpress plugins that allow registration on the front end by non-wordpress users, like Ultimate Member. I am not familiar with how those could work with bbpress.

Thanks!

[Robin W]

‘users register directly on the site without need to have an underlying account somewhere else’

If you install bbpress on a wordpress site, then anyone who registers with that site will be a bbpress user. They can then use the forum. They don’t need to be registered ‘somewhere else’ – just on your site.

You can also allow anonymous posting (but it does tend to get you spammed a lot!)

[w3215]

Thanks, but I think my situation is still slightly different than you have in mind, and maybe the difference is instructive. (or maybe I am not understanding what you mean.)

Let’s say I want to build a question and answer site, like stackoverflow or these discourse sites: https://discuss.atom.io/ or https://meta.discourse.org/. The question/answer piece (the forum piece) is THE site. It is not an add-on to a blog. It is an online tool like those sites are.

I understand that the common use case for bbpress is to be a modest forum that supplements an existing wordpress blog or wordpress advertising site. This is not what I have in mind. I am interested in seeing if bbpress can be used to build a web tool that would have its own (potentially large and active) user base.

I have considered other options out there–coding from scratch, discourse itself, NodeBB–but I have not seen anything as developed and creator friendly out of the box as bbpress. So I thought I’d give it a spin. For this to work, a few things have to be true:

1) Can BBPress handle many thousands of users and many many thousands of topics (or more)? It seems like the answer is yes, given there are forums out there with a lot of users/topics that seem ok. But a common reply here is “wait for version 2.6”–and version 2.6 has been 4 years+ in the making(!) So this brings up the question of whether BBPress is being maintained. (I asked that here: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/is-bbpress-being-maintained/). And whether bbpress can be performant at scale.

2) What do I have to do to enable anyone in the world to register for the bbpress-focused site? To use stackoverflow, you don’t need to be a wordpress user; same with those discourse sites. To run bbpress at all, I understand I have to have an underlying wordpress site. But I was hoping to use bbpress’ registration so people could sign up for the forum–and they would not even know wordpress was being used under the hood.

From what you are saying, sounds like this is not possible out of the box? Do I have to use a wordpress front end registration plugin like Ultimate Member and have that coordinate with bbpress, so that a user’s registration page–generated by ultimate member or some other like plugin–shows their posts and replies (just like your registration page at stackoverflow)?

3) I understand what I have in mind is not the common use case for bbpress–but based on what I am seeing, bbpress should be up to the job. Is there something I am missing–some reason you would not want to use bbpress to power a question and answer web app?

Thank you very much for your info.

[Robin W]

1. I’m just a user who helps out on the forums, you’ll need to judge for yourself if this will work capacity wise, but bbpress supports the wordpress forums which are huge.

2. you have to enable nothing – I can only suggest that you set up a wordpress site with just forums, and you’ll soon realise that your iste doens;t neeed to look wordpressy and that users can just register on that site fro the forums using the forum registration (which is just a front end for WordPress site registration. You don’t need to use any other plugins to get bbpress working.

3. Many people have a ‘just forum’ site, it is more common to have a forum as part of a site, but by no means necessary.

[w3215]

Thank you.

I did notice that this forum (bbpress.org) seems very big and, on my computer at least, it works very fast. Do you think here they are using the normal out of the box bbpress 2.5+, or maybe have they added some extras to make it extra fast?

[Robin W]

I think it’s 2.5 but not totally sure, it’s certainly been that big for a few years, and has always worked fine as long as I have been involved.

[w3215]

Thanks. This is all helpful to hear. Do you have any sense of what is going with the maintenance of bbpress? People have been talking about version 2.6 for 4 years+. bbpress seems terrific; I am hoping it is maintained with updated security, speed, etc.

[w3215]

Hi. On the issue of whether bbpress registration goes through WordPress registration–it appears that it does.

I put the bbpress registration page on my test site, and tried to create a new user. It took me to a WordPress page that said email not recognized. I believe what was happening was that in order to register for bbpress, I had to be a wordpress user, and I was taken to the wordpress page when wordpress could not find the email address.

So, based on this, indeed it does seem like in order to use bbpress users have to have WordPress accounts. This is what I do not want. Users should never be taken to a wordpress page to check if they are wordpress users.

Rather, users should be able to register directly on the site without having to have wordpress accounts.

Does anyone have a good way around this?

I am assuming the only way is through a front end registration plugin like Ultimate Member, but I would be happy if there was another way.

[Robin W]

Yes they have wordpress accounts – that is how it works. but you do not need to see a wordpress page

you would use something like theme my login to hide that

[w3215]

Thanks. Ok–sounds like I will need something like Ultimate Member so people can register without any wordpress account.

[w3215]

And just as an fyi, bc we seemed to be talking past each other a little:

The goal is to have users sign in without the users having any wordpress involvement at all. For example, nytimes.com (the new york times’ website) is, I believe, run by wordpress. But if you sign up for nytimes.com, users don’t have any connection to wordpress–when you sign up for nytimes.com you don’t become a member of wordpress, and most users don’t even know what wordpress is.

I am looking for something similar here. So the solution in this case is not just to hide the wordpress user sign-up admin screen, it is to not have the users have wordpress accounts at all. (creating an account at nytimes.com does not create a wordpress acount–if you use your log-in at nytimes.com for wordpress.org, it won’t work.)

There are plugins that enable you to do this, or at least mimic this behavior. Ultimate Member is one of the most prominent. But it has its own configuration. My hope was I could skip that configuring, in the case I could use the bbpress registration as a pure front-end registration, without any user-wordpress interaction at all. Looks like that is not the case.

This might have all been clear already, but just thought I’d throw it in there. Thanks for your help.

[Robin W]

ok, given that I probably amswered your original Q too literally let’s re-phrase that –

bbpress requires you to have an account on your website that is hooked to the wordpress software running on your website – which is what my original answer was. The username, password and all other details are only held only on your website. Nothing is passed to any other site (unless you add code to do so).

You are not required to have a wordpress.org username to use bbpress