[demonboy]

Hi,

I’m struggling here . It’s a crucial part of my forum structure to be able to allow non-logged in users to click into a forum and view the list of topics, but not be allowed to click into a topic to read them. This is because the content of those topics are for subscribed members only, but allowing that top-level view of the topic titles is a way of teasing non-logged in viewers to sign up.

I’d like to be able to do the same for logged in users of specific forums.

I’m still not understanding why bbpress does not allow this breakdown of different levels of viewing. Is it a structural thing where topics and replies are actually WP posts and can’t be differentiated? I’m interested to know what the coding implications are of allowing topic title view but blocking topic content view.

Perhaps another way of asking this is this:

How do I make all top level forums (i.e. the forum list) public, make all forums clickable to anyone so that the topic lists can be viewed, then restrict what topics are clickable depending on whether they are logged in as well as their logged-in capabilities?

[demonboy]

Hmmm, it seems that Thomas Zhu’s plugin, bbpress Member’s Only Pro plugin might do what I’m asking.

# Restricts your bbPress topics to Logged in/Registered members only.
# Restricts your bbPress replies to Logged in/Registered members only.
# Restricts your bbPress forums based on user roles.
# Restricts your bbPress topics based on user roles.

It also allows different levels of access based on different bbpress user roles, which is something I am also after. I’ll report back on whether this does what I want it to do, in case there is anyone else out there who has the same issues as me.

[demonboy]

OK, the plugin works well, with a couple of caveats.

The best thing about this plugin is that it is able to restrict the viewing of topics to topic archive based on user role, which is exactly what I wanted. This allows non-logged in users to see the forum archive, click into a forum, view the topic archive, but not click into a topic. Instead there’s a redirtect, which is perfect.

I can also set different forums and topics to different user roles. A ‘bronze’ user can see/read/reply to all topics in forum1, but read-only on forum2, and so on.

Couple of minor frustrations/issues:

1. You can only set the viewing status if you create a topic within the WP back-end. It would be nice if the administrator could have the check-boxes inline within the forum edit pages on the front end.

2. I realise there may be an issue where new topics, not started by me as the administrator, cannot have their viewing status set since forum users will not have access to the relevant checkboxes. It would be nice if there was a way of setting all new topics within a specific forum to inherit pre-defined viewing status.

Fortunately for me the only topics I’m going to be hiding are the ones I create myself. All other topics created by my forum members fall into forums that are publicly viewable and will have read-only access to all.

Hope this helps anyone who has the same topic archive issue I had.