[jbroskos]

Hey Everyone,

We migrated from Simple:Press today to bbPress and so far all is well after a little cleanup, but now I am noticing that we are experiencing issues with permissions within the roles and capabilities. We have 2 tiers of registered users which are our members and our officers. With this we have 2 seperate categories and forums within them with members only being able to see/edit the members forum and officers being able to see/edit the members forum and the officers forum.

According to here on bbPress, this should be possible as our “members” role would have the “read_private_forums” capability assigned to it and our “officers” role would have that capability as well as the “read_hidden_forums” capability assigned to it. Unfortunately…this is not working properly, our “members” role is not able to view there forum, so in the mean time, I’ve enabled the “read_hidden_forums” capability per and that seems to have “solved” the issue, however now there is no way to restrict access to the officers forum (Which I’ve temporarily deleted until this can be resolved).

Any help/input/ideas would be appreciated. This should work from what I am reading, so not sure why.

Thank you!

—–
Running:
WP v3.9.1
bbPress v2.5.3

[Robin W]

As you describe you should have

Private forums – readable only by logged in users with participant role (ie members)
Hidden forums – readable only by moderators/keymasters

Your issue is that logged in user cannot see the private forums.

At a quick guess I’d suggest that your users need roles assigned – having re-read my documentation this isn’t at all clear – I’m off to tidy that bit!

In dashboard>users>edit user you’ll find forum roles at the bottom of each user’s details

Anyway that’s my guess, come back if I guessed wrong !

You could also use

https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/bbp-private-groups if you don’t want to give your ‘officers’ back end access

[Stephen Edgar]

Hmmm… What you have outlined sounds like it should be working.

The one bit I am not sure about is you appear to only be describing WordPress roles and not also including bbPress’ roles in your description above.

Have you run the bbPress Repair Tool “Remap existing users to default forum roles”?(Tools->Forum)

This will set the users their bbPress role. The default role is Participant (You can change the default role via bbPress settings)

As outlined in the roles docs the bbPress role Particpant role includes the capability read_private_forums which in effect means any private forums can be read by users who are logged in, this would include your members and officers WordPress roles if you assign these WordPress role users the bbPress Participant role. If you assign your Officers WordPress role the bbPress Moderator role they will be able to read hidden forums because they have the read_hidden_forums bbPress capability.

[jbroskos]

You are both correct and I have run the repair tool (multiple times now) with no change.

I did verify the users are assigned to a forum role:

Here is a snapshot of the capabilities assigned to the Participant role:

And I’ve even went a step further and assigned the bbp capabilities directly to the wp role (members) I created with no luck.

I’ve also tried the bbp-private-groups plugin as you can see, but the problem I ran into was that the members could also see those forums and the topics within them even though the member was only assigned to “member” forums, not the “officers” forum.

[jbroskos]

I also tried quick this morning and removed all the bbp capabilities from the wp-roles I use, and the members users could not see anything. So I’m not sure if it is not looking at the bbpress roles even or if for some reason the capabilities assigned to those roles are not enough (when they should be).

Something seems messed up, but not sure what to do. Thinking of downloading a copy of the database and snooping around it if I get time at work today.

Any other thoughts/comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you again!

[jbroskos]

So I finally got the bbp-private-groups plug-in to work. I ended up having to make all the forums “public” and now (based of the bbp-private-group permissions) everything is working and those that don’t have access are being redirected to a different page.

I’m hoping this is just a band-aid and that I can get the core bbpress permissions to work again, so any assistance is still appreciated.

Thank you

[Robin W]

Interesting that without the private groups it didn’t work as expected, and with the private groups it also doesn’t work as expected.

Maybe be worth investigating the theme and other plugins to see if they are causing an issue.

so with private groups deactivated

Plugins

Deactivate all but bbpress and see if this fixes. if it does, re-enable one at a time to see which is causing the error.

Themes

If plugins don’t pinpoint the problem, switch to a default theme such as twentytwelve, and see if this fixes.

[Stephen Edgar]

Thanks for the detailed info @jbroskos, I agree things look correct there, but obviously are not working as expected.

If you do find the issue later on down the road let us know with some detailed reproduction steps and we can fix the issue once we can reproduce it https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ 🙂