I’ve looked through the (two) plugins that allows us to restrict forums, and sadly, it seems your guesses are correct. The first one which allows you to allow users in to a forum based on member names is hardly compatible with the latest version of bbPress (and seems dead). I almost got it working right, except for the fact that it messed up my forum hierarchy, and some other bugs, which meant that threads couldn’t be posted to a certain forum without being in that forum, which was enough for me to rule it out.
The other option, private forum as you tried out yourself, doesn’t allow us to do anything but restrict it to either members, mods or admins, which is the most viable solution to me at this point. It does mean however that I will need to give all my members who need access to the restricted forum moderator capabilities. Hardly ideal, but I’ll have to go with it for now.
I’ll be looking at it this weekend though, and hopefully I can find a sort of solution to it. Right now I’m thinking of finding a way to strip moderators of actual moderating powers, but I really don’t know. Adding another usergroup (pretty simple) should work too, but it has to be reflected in the plugin as well, but I don’t have the coding skills (I don’t have any coding skills) to do that.
Hopefully a gifted plugin developer will step in and solve this for us
I am on the same boat here. Actually I didn’t upgrade to 0.8.3 because of Forum Restriction breaking. I already have some sections of the forum pupulated, which need to be hidden from the general user, so upgrading is just not plausible for me right now. I am using it in conjunction with Private Forums plugin (which feels much better to me). If that plugin could be integrated with Roles it would be the best solution by far.
I am at a dead end for now. I can’t upgrade WordPress to 2.3 because bbPress breaks, and I can’t upgrade bbPress because I would be opening some important forums to everyone.
I thinking to start developping a plugin.
I’m not a real coder but i’ll try.
Anyway, I think the problem is that bbpress uses names and not levels (like wordpress) for roles, so it will be hard to do, no ?
If you have ideas, if you want to help me, please feed this threat !