Forum Replies Created
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I think there should be some kind of separation for the anonymous commentors, common sense stuff though, like they could comment on forum/group posts, but not on a personal update stream or whatever.
@Peterverkooijen just because buddypress or wordpress or whoever develop new features for an application doesn’t mean you are forced to use the new features. You don’t have to install the forums or allow user blogs.
The only reason I would still be against the group idea is because of the same thing I mentioned a few posts back about people not wanting to sign up and register for a website, not everybody wants to joint a group, even though I know you don’t have to join a group in buddypress to comment in the group discussion, it still has a bit of bad taste in the user experience just because of the name “groups” it brings back bad high school memories of clicks and the cool kids groups.
I feel like a moron now because I just discovered if I delete the forum tab and pretend the groups tab is the forum tab, it works basically exactly like the way I was describing I thought it should work haha. Even the urls are straight forward /groups/thegroupname and you are on the equivalent of a forum thread.
@Peterverkooijen I really like the idea of them all being mixed together, if nothing else just to see what can be done, breaking down boundaries. Sometimes you just want to blurt something out facebook or twitter style into your stream, other times you want to post something with a bit of direction that you would post on a website,blog, or messageboard, but in the end it is all one user account, one profile, in one familiar place.
And you do realize that bbpress still requires you to log in also right? When I suggested that I was referring to @lincme.co.uk talking about how one day blogs/forums/groups will merge into one thing. So it would embody aspects of social networking but also aspects of traditional websites and blogs which sometimes have 1 time visitors to read a news story and just want to ad a quick response. In the future this news article may be written as a forum post to a group, which is then query_posts(“showposts=10&category_name=whatever”); to a list on the front page of a website with a fancy little custom field thumbnail and excerpt.
Or maybe one day all buddypress installations will be able to be connected in a way, like gravator, so that I could be logged into my favorite skate magazine website, but post a comment to an article on a political website and this would show up in my universal buddypress stream, and then there is a time machine and flux capacitor plugin that can make ice cream sundaes……
@lincme.co.uk I agree with you on basically all of this, but there is still the major organizational problem with the way things are setup now, like look at the url of this page and how overly complicated that is. Like I said before I agree with you that renaming “forums” to “groups” is a great idea and that could really cut down the url/organization of things to something much easier for non-techies to follow like
thewebsite.com/groups/the-group-name/the-topic-title
An off topic suggestion, but I think non-techies are thrown off by having to register for websites and checking their email, verifying, password, etc. they don’t care enough and just leave. Most blogs don’t require you to register, at most you just have to enter a captcha, maybe having an option for group creators to allow non-registered visitors comment on topics would increase interactivity. Just a thought.
I think that would be a great idea to just ditch the forums. You click on a group of interest and all the discussions/topics/threads/whatever are right there. But that is what a forum already is, accept you would be calling it a group instead.
I completely agree with you about trying to simplify terminology and usage for non-techies, that is exactly why I dislike this groups concept. The irony of what you just explained about how people don’t understand forums and how they are a bad idea, is that buddypress still uses forums and the word forum itself, buddypress even goes one step further and adds another arbitrary layer of confusion called groups over top of the forums.
I agree people are more familiar with the word and concept of groups, but when they are groups of things they don’t understand, it is not helping anything. If this were my project I would start at the highest level with a “Talk” or “Discussion” or even the old “Message Board” section and then inside of that create groups to divide and organize the individual conversations/threads going on inside each group.
How are they in any way like a fanpage? A fanpage isn’t divided or organized by anything, they are like a single page blog.
Buddypress groups are like folders full of folders full of fan pages.
What is the idea even behind this “groups” concept? I have been trying to understand it and figure out a way to just work with it, but it just doesn’t make sense, it’s backwards. Traditionally you have a message board which is then divided into different groups, but here we got groups with a bunch of message boards inside them. Instead of narrowing down and organizing discussion subjects, it opens it up and scatters everything all over.
I’m really surprised nobody has written a plugin for this or the buddypress people haven’t worked it directly into the system yet, I’ve read so many complaints about this over the last 6 months or so.
I’m not sure if I would be able to follow all of that, but would that work the same integrating Buddypress and bbPress?
@r-a-y: how do you integrate the user bases
That kind of works but it still doesn’t eliminate all the groups confusion, when someone starts a new topic you still gotta tell it which group to go to, which will confuse people, the urls would so screwed up too, /groups/forum/forum/topic/theactualtopicname. Then there is probably a lot of other garbage still in the system that we are missing.
I’m familiar with bbPress, but I’m looking to setup a forum integrated with Buddypress.
Is there a plugin you used to remove all that group non-sense from the forums? Or did you have to manually go in and edit it?
Thank you. Kind of strange they put that in the Buddypress folders, shouldn’t that be inside the themes instead so you can keep updating buddypress?
I think the whole required groups thing is really strange also, I don’t see what the up side is to them.
Will this fix the problem with blogs as well? Or just the activity streams?
I think I finally follow what you are trying to say. But for the last 4 years I have ran a full admin news blog for our group and want to keep my account set to normal. Using this cloning plugin, wouldn’t that remove all the options from myself as well?
Well I’ve gone through all of those plugins and none of them are capable.
Wow! Thats a lot of plugins. I’ve tried some of them already with no luck, but I will have to give the rest a try and see what happens. Like I said though all I am really looking for is new blogs to be automatically set as author accounts.
I’ve been looking for some plugins to do this but no luck.
Is this not possible with this version of buddypress?
Maybe for the main website’s blog, but for their own blog they are automatically admins. And is there a way to set a default theme?
Where at? I’ve looked all over.
