[Alvaro Degives-Mas]

(Subtitle: how to use registration protection/filtering in WP for bbPress – the lazy but effective way!)

Say: you’re a PHP newbie (like me), want to run bbPress and WP, and have successfully completed the installation of the plugin to integrate the bbPress user database with WP’s (whew!) and then you discover that people can register via either the bbPress or WP . Suppose furthermore that you’re getting hammered by nasty bots registering themselves, and have an open self-registration policy on your WP blog/CMS, and therefore installed a nifty registration screening plugin (oh say, WP-reCAPTCHA) and would like to use that for bbPress.

How could you do that? With two simple edits you can:

1) Open the register.php file of bbPress (in bbPress’ root directory) and delete EVERYTHING in it, and save your cleaned-out register.php file back to its place on the server (saving an empty file is to avoid a possible “file not found” error after the next step)

2) Open (or create if you don’t have it – which would be rare) a .htaccess file in the web server’s root directory and add the following single line (it’s displayed here on two lines, but really ought to be a single line!), and put that at/near the top of your .htaccess file (assuming your bbPress install sits in the /forum sub directory; else, modify accordingly to point to the register.php file):

Redirect permanent /forum/register.php http://www.example.com/wp-login.php?action=register

Make sure you substitute “example.com” with your own domain (of course).

3) This step is non-existent. Instead, enjoy your newfound unified registration bliss for dummies!