[mattiejas]

I’m running a website with two private groups, and I’ve run into a snag. It turns out that all logged in users can also see topics posted into private forums in the “recent topics” widget, even if they are not member of a private group. Naturally if they click on these topics, they cannot see the contents of the thread, but the topic titles occasionally do leak information that they shouldn’t be able to see.

Is this a known bug with the bbpress “recent topics” widget? Is there a way of fixing this?

I’m running wordpress 4.7.2, buddypress 2.7.4, and bbpress 2.5.12 (also jetpack, askimet, and wordfence, at their latest versions). Happy to provide more information if need be.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[mattiejas]

… well I think I found a solution: set the forum visibility to “hidden”. I wish this would have been documented somewhere (maybe it is, but I couldn’t find anything about “private” vs “hidden” forums in the documentation).

So if anyone else runs into this: if you have “private” or “hidden” groups, in either case most likely you want to set the group forum to “hidden”, as far as I can tell.

[mattiejas]

… I cried victory too early: I ran into https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/recent-topicsreplies-from-private-forum-are-not-displayed-in-widget-why/ and moreover the workaround suggested there doesn’t work for hidden forums. 🙁 So back to square one…