Unlike WordPress I don’t believe bbPress has an easy way to do role management (yet). There is a privilege built-in for bb_current_user_can( 'write_topics' ) which means it is technically possible to control who can start topics by taking away that role privilege from the “member” role.
In theory a small plugin should be able to do this – I’ll take a look at how it might be done as an exercise in learning more about bbPress roles…
Aha! I think it’s this simple. Make yourself a mini-plugin and install it containing this:
global $bb_roles;
$bb_roles->remove_cap('member','write_topics');
If you don’t know how to make a plugin, it might be possible to just put those two lines into your template’s header.php
But what if you only want to do this for a specific forum, and not for all your forums? On my site I have an “announcements” forum where I would like to limit who can post, but I also have a “troubleshooting” section where members do need to post.
This question is related:
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/key-master-only-forum#post-15457
I think I will make a real plugin since this seems to be a requested feature that is not too hard to handle in 0.9 Look for it in the plugin section over the next day or two.
