I am working with a client who wants to password protect certain forums, they are already private and only visible to registered users, but she has some info that she does not want available to all registered users that is paid for so she wants to password protect the forum. This was possible before with older versions of bbPress as I’ve done it before.

We have found the Private Groups but that creates a lot of work to constantly be updating the people who should have access to it. Hoping to find a mod or plugin that will allow us to add passwords to the forums we need them so so that we can protect the data in those forums from people who do not have access to it, or shouldn’t.

I have searched on Google many times but keep ending up at Private Groups, anyone know of a way to do this?

[@robin-w Moderator 7 years, 3 months ago]

I’m not aware that this was previously possible with bbpresss v2 (may have been with v1) – I am author of private groups.

2 questions

1. if password protected, how would you envisage the forum working – can you describe it’s set up
eg who would see the forum and when?

2. I could do with understanding the time saving over using private groups. In one case you allocated someone to a group, in the other you email someone a password, isn’t time taken the same? With passwords if you ever want to change who can see, you have to tell everyone the new password, with private groups you just change the user. With passwords everyone has to remember the password, and there is a risk that it is compromised. Please understand – I’m not arguing that you don’t have a valid proposition, just trying to understand whether I can make PG better, or if I can see you angle, add PW capability to my plugin.

[@vegascoug2 Participant 7 years, 3 months ago]

It was close to 10 years ago we did this.

The reason why passwords work better for us here is that we can arrange a class for paid members, several classes each month. The instructions and curriculum will be in private/locked forum. This will change every month and we will have multiple classes each month.

If we can simply add a password, we can email that out to the class lists. Using private groups someone would have to modify all those users and that is time consuming. Also what if a person pays for 2 of the 4 classes offered, how would groups handle that? The user would have to be a member of multiple groups. There will be new offerings every month so the list of groups would grow to an unmanageable task.

It may have been a mod I did to allow the passwords before, I don’t remember. This was long before WordPress.

[@robin-w Moderator 7 years, 3 months ago]

10 years ago would have been bbpress version 1, which probably explains it.

I’d need to look at how best to do a password protect, and it would be a couple of weeks due to other commitments, might well be a standalone plugin rather than private groups, as that plugin is now so full that I have to keep refreshing myself on how it works !

If you’d be interested, contact me via my website

http://www.rewweb.co.uk