What Iām trying to accomplish has to do with controlling access to various forums based on the url.
do you want to expand on what you are planning to achieve please? Does control mean prevent ?
Yes, control means prevent. I’d like people with different types of memberships to be able to access different forums. I can exercise control based on the URL, but the fact that the topic URLs are not “tied” to the forum URLs means that people can go directly to the topics (which can be easy to guess) even if they can’t access the forum directly.
The ‘memberships’ I’m talking about are MemberPress subscriptions. MP actually has a strategy for controlling bbPress forum access, but (AFAICT) it doesn’t quite work with the degree of control I would like.
I don’t understand ALL the ins and outs of either MemberPress or bbPress, just for the record. What I’m doing here is partially a learning exercise. But I actually do have a practical application on the physics site my wife and I run: PhysicsCafe.org.
ok, I think I understand, but guessing form names is also possible.
Maybe this is what you need
Private groups
Yes, I’m sure that guessing forum names is even easier than guessing topics. But it’s easy to protect the forums, just not the topics. The whole business with MP “rules” is a bit complicated.
The fact that you mentioned groups (which I haven’t used) made me take a look at that. It turns out that, if you use groups, then all the topics (as well as the group forum) do appear under the group in the url. So, one could use groups in conjunction with MP wildcard rules to provide per group protection based on MP subscriptions. I hadn’t thought of that, and it’s a good thing to keep in mind. Though it’s a bit hokey. I think I’m going to use this as motivation to do more work on understanding the memberpress code, especially surrounding rules. That’s something I probably should be doing anyway.
Re: the Private Groups plug-in. I didn’t actually try it, but I looked over the documentation and it looks like another awesome plugin. It also looks like a more flexible and easier way to manage group access than what I’m doing. But for better or worse, I’m sort of tied to doing things through MP subscriptions and therefore MP rules. But others who might stumble onto this thread looking to control forum access will certainly want to consider Private Groups.
