[astay87]

Hi,

I’m hoping someone who knows bbPress inside and out might be able to help with this tricky request:

I’m trying to add a specific kind of user-to-user contact functionality to my site. Users should only be able to contact one another when the admin (me) opens up a temporary communication channel between two of them (could be a private group, forum, message system, I’m not picky).

Sort of like how Airbnb or Uber temporarily enable private two-way communication channels they can monitor between guest and host, or passenger and driver. Any ideas?

I’m happy to power this manually (creating a group, adding members, then deleting it later) but haven’t been able to figure out how to ONLY enable this type of contact and not let users contact each other outside of these admin-created channels.

Thank you very much!!

[John James Jacoby]

Hi there!

If you’re looking for an off-the-shelf solution, BuddyPress and the Private Messages component sounds like the best one. You’d still need to tune it a bit with some custom code to lock it down exactly how you’ve described, but it gives you isolated message threads with invitees, notifications, an inbox, etc…

Technically, in the next major version of bbPress (2.6) you could use the new engagements API to keep those conversations a forum topic, but limit them to specific invited users, but that’s probably more work and less obvious to end users what it’s for & doing.

[astay87]

Thank a lot JJJ! I appreciate your answer, I’ll start poking around Private Messages and BuddyPress, hopefully it works with my Ultimate Member plugin.

Best,
Tony