As admin, when setting up a new forum, under “Forum Attributes” there’s a “Type” and I can apparently choose between making a “Category” and a “Forum”. What is the difference?

As far as I can tell, you use a “Category” if you want to group a collection of forums under a parent forum, but you don’t want that parent forum to be a place where users can post. Did I understand this correctly, and is this the complete scope of this separation?

[@clicknathan Participant 13 years, 3 months ago]

You understood correctly, Erlend.

[@anointed Participant 13 years, 3 months ago]

Correct.

Category forums are great for ‘grouping’ a bunch of forums together. Also a category forum cannot contain it’s own posts, hence no ‘add topic’ box to the category forum page.

[@sadr Participant 13 years, 3 months ago]

Thanks for confirming. I’d be happy to add it to the docs somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to be set up for contributions at the moment. Hopefully that’ll eventually come along with the other site improvements bound to happen when bbpress.org is updated to bbPress 2.

[@paulwclark Participant 12 years ago]

So if I was creating a Forum that contained a list of music genres, and wanted people to create topics and post comments about each different genre, I’d first create a Genres Category and then separate Forums for each genre with the parent being the Genres Category?

[@lynq Participant 12 years ago]

Correct.

[@monica4567 Participant 11 years, 11 months ago]

Hi,

I’m on the same page as the author of this question, and I understand categories and forums this much. My problem is I’ve created a category, then put two forums I had under it (made the category the Parent for the two forums) and now the forums aren’t visible on the page. Can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.

[@dopeboy Participant 8 years, 3 months ago]

Acknowledged…:)

[@copyoppy Participant 7 years, 5 months ago]

I have created all the categories needed. Please how can I display the categories description under each category. Thanks