[Matt]

We’ve set all but two of our forums to be private, and yet if you go to /discussions then every discussion is listed!

Granted if you click on any of them you get a 404 error, but that in turn throws up crawl errors with Google and isn’t great user experience either. Plus users assume quite rightly that if they post in a private forum, the content of the discussion including the titles shouldn’t be visible on the public site.

As an aside, if you go to message boards that’s working fine – it displays the 2 public forums if you’re logged out, and all 14 forums if you’re logged in, so that’s fine. It’s the discussion archive pages that seem to be the loophole.

[Pascal Casier]

Hi,
Are you using any plugins to keep things private ? I’m using bbP Private Groups and it seems to do what I expect from it.
But for your specific issue, I don’t see immediately what to do…
Pascal.

[Matt]

No BBPress piggyback plugins I’m afraid, just the normal BuddyPress + BBPress combo. The private forums functionality is included in out-of-the-box BBPress.

We have other plugins on the site such as Advanced Access Manager and WordFence, but can’t see why they would affect what discussions are listed; I may be wrong, but it seems most likely to be an oversight of BBPress’ programming.

[Matt]

Ah I tell a lie, we also have BBPress Notify (No Spam) installed

[Matt]

If I run the following MySQL query…

SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type LIKE 'forum'

…I notice that post_status = ‘private’ for the private forums. That makes sense.
However, if I run…

SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type LIKE 'topic'

…I notice that all the topics have post_status = ‘publish’ whether they are in a private forum or not.

Is there any reason why they aren’t post_status = ‘private’? Might that be why the archive lists them?