@fishmilk – i don’t have an answer to your question but i too have been experiencing similar strangeness thus i suspect there is a bug in bbPress with new users ..??.. i’m outlining my issue below incase our experiences are related ..??..
i’m running tests on a multisite network and had bbPress installed on a sub site … then i installed BuddyPress and did some testing and that is when i found strangeness with bbPress as follows …
when i logged into the sub site forums with a user that was added previously to the site, then all was fine … but if i tried to login as a subscriber to the network but not to that site, then i got a series of 404 errors with forums and topics not found … these links worked to a non logged in user, and worked to a logged in registered user added to the site and worked for the admin, and these links as hover overs even showed the correct permalink structure … yet when clicked on as logged in user registered to network and not to site, the permalinks were screwy – e.g., site.com/sub-site01/sub-site01/forum/topic-xyz .. thus a double sub-site01 was being added …
so then i turned off BuddyPress and still same thing … then i turned off bbPress network enabled and enabled only on subsite as original and same thing … then i changed the network settings so that the default login for that subsite was subscriber and ditto, same thing in that a user on a network would not be able to access the forums … the only way for the new user to access forums is if i go to that subsite as admin and manually add the subscriber … then it seems to work …
my next step is to delete all my MySQL tables and try this again … partly because along my path i test the Commons in a Box BuddyPress plugin and that network enabled bbPress automatically even though i had bbPress enabled on the sub site … never thought to check that first and so not sure if something got corrupted a bit or if indeed bbPress is having issue with new users on a network (e.g., especially, if they haven’t posted, or commented in advance ??)
looping back to your error messages … i saw some of the same ones during my path … once i disabled Commons in a Box, and repaired my forums, things seemed to come back online but i noticed that one of the avatars for my test log in subscribers was missing which leads me to believe there is possible table corruption on this end ..??..
just a follow up in that i did some additional testing on a live production site and confirmed bug behavior so i just submitted a bug ticket here ->
https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2325#ticket
Have you tried turning on the “auto role” setting? That will auto assign them when they visit the site.
@Jared – WOW – that seemed to do the trick … THANK YOU … i will update my trac ticket … as fyi, part of me thinks forum permalinks should work with that option on or off but hey, it now works* with it set on so that is good enough for me … thanks again for pointer as this was driving me a bit nutty and driving me a bit towards “Now what did i do wrong … what do i no understand about flushing permalinks, configuring this yada yada” thus while my confidence might have dipped a bit during this testing experience, i am certainly grateful for helpful bbPress community and pros that nudge us forward for success results :>) cordially, chuck scott
*for others who might stumble on this thread – the working part means that now anybody who is on the network as a registered user, but not a member of a particular sub site that uses forums, with this option Jared mentions set to “on” said users when they log in to that sub site will see forums with working permalinks – in my case, they were treated as subscribers thus could not comment or create new forums …
