I’m struggling to get my head around users/members/subscribers of public vs private forums. Here’s what I want to do:

1. Six forums, all readable by everyone, including non-logged in users
2. One of those six viewable forums is a members-only club (private?) but fully readable by everyone, including non-logged in users
3. That one members-only club is made up of members manually controlled by the admin
4. Subscribers can add any content to the five public forums

Q1. How do I make a private forum read-only to everyone?
Q2. What’s the best plugin to help me assign a new role (club member) and allow them write-access to the forum?

Any hints gratefully received.

Thanks,

Jamie

[@robin-w Moderator 10 years, 6 months ago]

Different access levels to different forums is not within the core product or my private groups plugin. I’m am struggling without some bespoke coding to think how you would achieve this.

[@demonboy Participant 10 years, 6 months ago]

It’s a little frustrating, Robin. In the forum I’m developing, which is an import from Simple Press, the private club (the most prominent forum of the six) needs to allows non-members to see what’s going on in order to help encourage them to join. SimplePress handled this situation just fine, but in bbpress marking it as ‘private’ prevents anyone from seeing it. As a consequence I’ve had to set new forum members to ‘spectator’ for the time being, and create a new role (using Justin’s Members plugin) for the private club members. This doesn’t solve the problem, of course.

You can see it in action here where the Assignments Submissions forum is the members-only club. I’d like to make all the other forums public where logging in with FB, Twitter gives them immediate ‘contributor’ status, but only spectator on the Assignment Submissions forum.

[@robin-w Moderator 10 years, 6 months ago]

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbp-private-groups/

would get you further than the members plugin

With this you could have

5 forums fully visible and useable
by not setting any restriction on them

1 forum set to restrict to say group 1 called ‘members’

and

all ‘members’ participant users of group 1 ‘members’
all other users are just participants with no group set.

Then set forum visibility

All forum users would see that all 6 forums exist. They would also see all the topic listings, but if they clicked a topic, they would get a message (which you define, maybe sending them to say a sign up page).

so it would make the forums and headings of topics visible, but not the content of topics.

Best I can do without coding !

[@demonboy Participant 10 years, 6 months ago]

Thanks for that, Robin, I appreciate your time on this. I’ll give it a go in a moment, though it doesn’t get round the problem of allowing EVERYONE to view the private forum, including non-logged-in users. That is the single most important point of this exercise.

I had another thought though: couldn’t I close the forum and then give club members certain rights that over-ride that status? Kinda the same as an admin but without total admin rights?

I’ll look into this first before trying your solution as a temporary work-around.

Finally, if all else fails, what options do I have involving coding? Feel free to email me to discuss further.

[@robin-w Moderator 10 years, 6 months ago]

ok, let me know how you get on.

If you’d like specific coding done, then try wordpress jobs

http://jobs.wordpress.net/