Read-only forums are tricky to do as bbPress does not have any structure in place for forum permissions to the best of my knowledge, only user permissions to a certain extent. Apparently no-one considered forum control important in a forum program? Hmm.
The private forums plugin has to insert alot of code just to mange making forums invisible to certain users (and still can miss some areas). To make them read only, while removing the “new post” form seems obvious, it wouldn’t solve the problem as there are two or three places to create a new post (and apparently in future versions via trackbacks). Unfortunately none of that can be done via plugins, it would have to be a direct hack.
Perhaps in a future version they will consider forum permissions to make this easier. Other mature forum software has this ability, easily. I will look into how tricky the direct hack might be, probably not too hard, but keep in mind you’ll have to re-do it every time you upgrade.
One easy workaround for now would be to manually close all your posted topics in a forum.
Thanks for the lengthy response 
It is kind of strange that forum permissions was not their main priority when creating this package. I don’t want this to dampen how I feel about bbpress though. Since the private forums feature works it already fixes half of my problem.
One easy workaround for now would be to manually close all your posted topics in a forum.
I dont see how this would prevent users from creating new topics altogether. These parent forums are simply supposed to act as titles… i’ll see if I can find anything in the code to fix this.
^^
Solved 1 problem.
‘
<td><?php bb_forum_pad( ‘<div class=”nest”>“>’ ); ?><?php forum_name(); ?><small><?php forum_description(); ?></small><?php bb_forum_pad( ‘</div>“>’ ); ?></td>
‘
I put the href tags inside the () of bb_forum_pad ^^ That fixed the link issue.
Now just need to figure out how to block links towards them.. I could do custom rewrite rules … mmmm ^^
bleh.. cant write it like that with the <?php ?> inside the () .. how am I supposed to write it? my php skills isnt so good ;P
What you are trying to do with read-only has to be done in post-form.php
You’d have to wrap it in a check for which forum id # it is and not allow the form to render if it’s one of the forums you don’t want posts in. Of course this blocks admin too which is bad so you’d have to check bb_current_user_can(“administrate”) too.
Then there is the dropdown section, where you’d have to prevent the forum name from listing, so that needs a replacement function. It’s not 10 minutes of code unfortunately or I’d do it for you.
Basically you’d need a completely custom post-form.php in your template.
“Of course this blocks admin too which is bad so”
I have no reason to use the forums that I wish to restrict. Im only using them for titles sake
Thanks for commenting
