I originally posted this on the BuddyPress forum, It was suggested that I might have better luck getting an answer here. My apologies if this is redundant to some.

I have the legacy forums set up on my site, barronsquare.org. I want to move up to bbPress. I especially want the “Follow this topic” notifications and reply ‘threading’.

• Running WP v3.7.1, BP v1.9, Suffusion child theme with Suffusion BuddyPress Pack
• ‘Public’ portion visible to users who are not members
• ‘Private’ portion for members only.
• “All Residents” GROUP with auto join for all MEMBERS with forums.
• Several other smaller sub-groups with forums.
• Forums are not public.

Tried the upgrade to bbPress 2.2 (with Suffusion bbPress Pack) on my WAMP localserver version of site and had all kinds of problems migrating content, etc. Many of the data ‘repair’ functions failed. I could not get the ‘threaded replies to work. Eventually got the forums to mostly work, but still have questions.

1. Would I be better with a ‘site-wide’ forum rather than the private All Residents group?
2. Can I make a site-wide forum private?
3. How do I modify the formatting of the forum postings?
4. Where do I look to troubleshoot the ‘threading’ function?

Happy Holidays to all.

Maury

[@mauryg Participant 11 years ago]

Part of the problem resolved…my Christmas present to myself.
The problem was in the ‘psychology’ of the site.
Since only registered members can access the ‘all-residents’ group and forums, there was no need for that group to be ‘private’. Once I made the GROUP ‘public’ then the regular sitename/forums link worked perfectly, but the groups and forums were still NOT visible to the non-logged-in public. Since I don’t use the ‘friending’ feature and only designated moderators can form groups, I don’t think it is necessary to have the ‘all-residents’ GROUP and the all-residents FORUM is simply ‘site-wide’.
Still leaves the questions of formatting the forum postings and threading (indenting) the replies.

[@netweb Keymaster 10 years, 12 months ago]

Would I be better with a ‘site-wide’ forum rather than the private All Residents group?

I think this is now sorted based on your reply.

Can I make a site-wide forum private?

Same this is now sorted.

How do I modify the formatting of the forum postings?

If you want custom templates then follow the steps outlined here to make copies of the templates in your theme so they don’t get overridden when you update bbPress.

https://codex.bbpress.org/theme-compatibility/

Where do I look to troubleshoot the ‘threading’ function?

You state you are using ‘bbPress 2.2’, threaded replies were introduced in bbPress 2.4 so you should upgrade to the latest bbPress 2.5.2. You can then enable them in bbPress settings per https://codex.bbpress.org/forum-settings/#forum-features

[@mauryg Participant 10 years, 12 months ago]

@Stephen

Thanks for the reply.
You’re correct. The first two points were covered except that I need to test if I can eliminate the ‘All Members’ public group and just use a sitewide forum.
In the meantime I had successfully upgraded to bbPress 2.5.1 and I have now gone to 2.5.2.
I’ll check the theme compatibility article although I am using a child theme of Suffusion and I have installed the Suffusion bbPress pack.
The threaded reply setting was enabled to a depth of ‘2’. The first reply was at the same level as the original posting and the reply to that was indented one level. When I increased the depth to ‘4’ and added more replies to replies, the threading worked. I guess I can live with the first reply being at the same level or I can muck around with the CSS if need be. 😉

Happy New Year

Maury