[lemond404]

Hi Folks – I hope someone can take a look at this particular issue I’m having!

WP 4.1
BB 2.5.4
Buddy 2.0.2

Participants can login, see the forums, but now receive “Oh bother! No topics were found here” when attempting to view the contents of the forum. When I change their status to Moderator, they can see it and write new topics and replies.

I have subscriber roles that allow them access to the private forums. Changing these settings do not affect their ability to access the forum.

Is there a setting somewhere in these versions that would cause Participants to lose the ability to read the forums?

Note – I have deactivated all plugins except bbpress and activated a new theme without change. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[Robin W]

ok,

something has changed !

when did this start, and how old is the forum?

how many ‘forum’s are there, and is it happening to all?

Have you done any upgrades?

[lemond404]

We noticed that the forums page was not accurately showing the latest(freshness) post in each category – i.e. the latest post listed was older than the most recent post once you click through into the category about 4 days ago. Since then, we were informed that Participants could not see the topics, etc.

We have one forum which is about a year old. We recently applied the new buddypress and WP updates, along with Contact Form and twitter widget updates.

I added a few user capabilities plugins to edit roles but none have done the trick.

[Robin W]

suggest you run repair next

dashboard>tools>forums>repair and run one at a time

[lemond404]

done. We had a few users default roles, but nothing else changed.

We had to do a site restore and lost 2 months of data but issue(s) still persists. It’s even more buggy now as moderators have lost the ability to read topics…

[John James Jacoby]

I added a few user capabilities plugins to edit roles but none have done the trick.

This likely did more harm than good.

Try installing the following plugin (by me) which provides a nice user-interface for identifying where your bbPress roles and capabilities have gone wrong:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbp-capabilities/

This plugin was originally a hidden tool tucked into bbPress, but was extracted into a plugin once we went with dynamic role registration.

The thing with bbPress roles, is that they work amazingly well for the large majority of installations. For the very small minority that want to deeply integrate it with other plugins or services, it works a bit differently than WordPress’s native roles and capabilities (for the better, to be frank) which requires a bit of special handling.

[lemond404]

Thanks John, I’ll need to refresh my memory on the relationships between WP site roles and forum roles. We have been using (subscriber/participant, moderator/moderator and admin/moderator). Somewhere a change caused a conflict that broke the forum roles.

We’re also not sure why the freshness went out of sync but in the event of a hack, we did a site restore and are now back online. We also added your plugin.