WP 4.1.1
bbPress 2.5.6

My forums are marked as Private. My members have the forum role of Participant. They can see the private forums, but are unable to see the underlying topics. The counts are there, but when the forum is opened, they receive the message “Oh bother! No topics were found here!”.

Using the plugin “bbPress Advanced Capabilities”, I see the following.

View private forums : Allow
View private topics : Denied
View private replies : Denied

So I use the above plugin to change the Denied to Allow for a particular user. It has no effect. I have also done the repair to remap everyone to the default, which is Participant. The private topics are also not appearing in the Twenty Fourteen theme.

Why is this happening if private forums are supposed to be available to logged in members? How can I correct this for my 3,000 members? We just migrated all the users into the database, so is there some other flag we need to set for everyone?

[@evanevans333 Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

And just to confirm, I have deactivated all relevant plugins and changed to different themes and can confirm it continues to be an issue.

[@evanevans333 Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

Alright Robin, well thank you for your expertise, and we can safely say we’ve made progress. We’ve covered ground. Stay tuned, because I must solve this issue, it’s been going on for 3 weeks, and I will solve this ASAP. Thanks again!

[@evanevans333 Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

I can confirm though, your fix did not resolve the issue, using the minimal Theme “Twenty Fourteen” with all plugins except “bbPress” disabled. So, I’m not sure how it is fixed for you on your end. Are you running the latest bbPress? Do you have a minimal test configuration?

Thank you anyway though Robin, for your help.

If anyone else can help, I appreciate it. Thanks in advance! I will be monitoring this thread. I need a solution to this ASAP. It’s been almost 3 weeks and it’s holding up our website launch.

[@robin-w Moderator 8 years, 3 months ago]

if topics are set as published then my ‘fix’ won’t help.

[@evanevans333 Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

Oh, you didn’t mention that before. How can Participants see unpublished topics?

[@evanevans333 Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

Out of curiosity, is that a network site you tested on? Mine is not, and there is some talk in other threads about how the Participant role is designed for Network sites.

[@evanevans333 Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

I’m starting to get the feeling, that because Forum Roles are not meant to handle Forum privacy (as per the bbPress spec), that I am supposed to set their privacy to Public and use some kind of FORUM PRIVACY plugin to make sure the content doesn’t get leaked out to Google and anonymous web surfers. Is that the intention of bbPress? It seems that’s all we got to work with. Participant role is not supposed to be for wordpress Subscribers apparently. You need to become something else, to read topics and replies inside forums marked private, and I guess shouldn’t mark a forum private with bbPress unless it’s supposed to be private for Moderators and Administrators.

That seems so … ridiculous if you pardon my French. That Forum Roles are not for forum privacy, but more for Forum administrative privacy.

If I might back up for a moment, what I’m trying to achieve, is that Forums that I set to Private, contents are not visible by anonymous/bots/spiders, but are visible to registered users of the website (Subscribers, which I can set to automatically default to the Participant Forum role inside bbPress settings). It seems a sane, rational, logical concept. But I do see that this issue has been going on for YEARS.

[@evanevans333 Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

Ok, on the above theory, I got it to work. Well the functionality anyway. I still can’t seem to mod the caps of Participant role.

But, what I did was use the plugin: “bbp private groups”
https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbp-private-groups/
and set the forums I wish to be private, to PUBLIC (ironic and backwards that is) in the bbPress Forum Attributes for a Forum, and in “bbp private groups” assigning the Subscriber role to the bbp Private Group “role” of GROUP1 (which I aptly named Subscribers). Additionally you need to set a user to that GROUP1 and select the option in “bbp private groups” to add users to that GROUP1 anytime they login (or you can manually in bulk update everyone (or just those matching a particular role) to have that permission).

[@robin-w Moderator 8 years, 3 months ago]

I still can’t seem to mod the caps of Participant role.

ok, I’ll bite once more – can you post EXACTLY what you have as code to fix that, and tell me where you have put it.

and set the forums I wish to be private, to PUBLIC (ironic and backwards that is)

Private groups is my plugin, and yes agree gthat public seems wrong, but I can only work with what bbpress gives me, and use code to improve !

[@evanevans333 Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

Hi Robin, thanks for helping some more…

What I’m saying is, I used a plugin called BBP PRIVATE GROUPS in order to “privatize” certain forums because the forum was set to be viewable only by people of a certain “group”. In that plugin, the main group is called GROUP1, which I just named “Subscribers” (just a coincidence that I name it that) and I can apply it to everyone who has registered (Subscriber role) on my website across the board.

Then I set the bbPress privacy of the Forum, to PUBLIC, and made it so that only GROUP1 people can access it in the privacy settings of BBP PRIVATE GROUPS, by setting that Forum to require GROUP1 access.

It’s an absolutely absurd workaround, because I’m literally setting the privacy to PUBLIC in bbPress and than using another plugin to make the Forum Private, but by doing it this way, at LEAST my Participant Subscribers can access the “Public” forum, so long as they are members of the BBP PRIVATE GROUPS – GROUP 1 “Subscribers” group.

So basically, I am doing what bbPress should do by default, but as a workaround with an entirely different plugin to handle it. The privacy restriction or permissions could not be properly handled with bbPress setting a forum to “Private”, so I am using that BBP PRIVATE GROUPS plugin to set it to private.

The ultimate goal of all this, was, to make sure that people who are registered to my site, can view and participate in Forums that anonymous/google/bots cannot see. But when I tried to do that by setting a forum’s privacy to “Private” bbPress annoyingly made it so that Participants registered with my website could go INTO the forum and see the Forum and Topic counts, and could post topics, but could NOT see the topics in there nor replies or reply to anything.

In order for a role to “See” those Topics and Replies, they had to be a Moderator, Keymaster, or Administrator. Even IF bbPress team wants Participant member caps to behave like this, they should at LEAST provide a role between Participant and Moderator, so that normal registered users of a bbPress enabled website, can participate in forum discussions cutoff from anonymous web viewing because they are set to “private”.

Now, the issue moving forward is, that topic and reply activity that go on inside those forums, is not properly being set to Private and so those Activities are showing up in widgets and shortcode locations and archives as public information, because those kinds of presentations of the information inside those forums are not governed by the BBP PRIVATE GROUPS plugin. In other words, it’s a mess, and this really should be handled by bbPress. bbPress should give us the ability to modify caps on Participant, or like I said, at least provide a ROLE that is an inbetween that is compatible with the development of all other plugins that work with bbPress (ie: we need bbPress to create this role as a standard).

[@robin-w Moderator 8 years, 3 months ago]

ok.

I am the author of the private groups plugin, which I wrote to get over the limitations of bbpress. I have no relationship to bbpress, and can only work with what bbpress gives me, hence we end up with something that is ‘public’ and then using a plugin to make it private.

…so those Activities are showing up in widgets and shortcode locations and archives as public information

In the private groups plugin there are shortcodes and widgets that work with my plugin to hide stuff, go into

Dashboard>settings>bbp private groups

and look at the ‘widget warning’ and ‘shortcode warning’ tabs you will see the replacements.

[@evanevans333 Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

Oh my goodness! haha. That’s quite the coincidence, or is it? 🙂

Regarding your widgets and shortcodes, yes I am aware, but prefer to use my current widgets. The ultimate problem though is how it’s writing information into the Activity Stream in BuddyPress without said information staying under wraps.

Would you like to provide me a link to your support forum for your plugin (wow man, great job), and we can continue discussing these potential improvements to your plugin over there?

Best,
Evan

[@robin-w Moderator 8 years, 3 months ago]

not really sure that if you don’t want to use my widgets I can help further. By all mean put up a post suggesting improvements though

[@robkk Moderator 8 years, 3 months ago]

@evanevans333

It seems that’s all we got to work with. Participant role is not supposed to be for wordpress Subscribers apparently. You need to become something else, to read topics and replies inside forums marked private, and I guess shouldn’t mark a forum private with bbPress unless it’s supposed to be private for Moderators and Administrators.

That seems so … ridiculous if you pardon my French. That Forum Roles are not for forum privacy, but more for Forum administrative privacy.

You are probably experiencing a bug, or just some issues with your current configuration, private forum should be for logged in users only. Also a specific forum for mods and admins might be a hidden forum.

Im skimming through the topic right now, but I will look at this topic more tomorrow morning and see if I need to report any issues.

What I say that we do is try to fix the private forum issue in bbPress by default without using Robins plugin for now, then when its fixed you can decide to use it later if you want to.

Run the repair tools one at a time in Tools > Forums. There are a few that are definitely helpful like repairing private forum relationships.

Editing user role caps for some users could cause issues as well, so we might need to refresh each roles caps, and remap the default ones to users.

that I am supposed to set their privacy to Public and use some kind of FORUM PRIVACY plugin to make sure the content doesn’t get leaked out to Google and anonymous web surfers.

If you want a forum for only logged in users setting a forum or parent forum private will do that. Other niche privacy features could be obtained through plugins.

Now, the issue moving forward is, that topic and reply activity that go on inside those forums, is not properly being set to Private and so those Activities are showing up in widgets and shortcode locations and archives as public information

Do you want all your forums to be private? It might be better to put anything bbPress as members only content, like just block off sections of your site to only members using a different type of plugin.

If you do want some forums to be public, then I guess we can use some conditionals for some widgets to display different widgets for logged in users and those who are not. Like say the recent replies widget, I would display only replies from public forums to users not logged in in one widget, and display all replies to users who are not logged in another. If you do want to use Robins plugin, he does have custom widgets in it, but that is if you want group forums.

[@emilygros Participant 4 years ago]

it is great information