Well with the fact that I used a custom function in order to allow upper case in username during these user’s sign up, I’m not sure if its a bug or a result of the function.
As I’ve stated before, buddypress was reinstalled on the same database with no change.
I’ve already tried a fresh install, all worked fine. However without knowing what custom function was used before to allow uppercases in username on sign up, I can’t honestly duplicate the bug.
I’ve tried going into phpmyadmin, and manually entering a display name on the users affected, the display name doesn’t show, still uses the username, and changing the display name still isn’t possible.
Update: Now that I know about the uppercase function previously used, I looked in the database to see if anything would show there. It would seem that users that are affected don’t actually have any entry in the Display Name in the database, would seem its using the username as the display name.
I don’t know when it began, to be honest I never noticed it on the forums, for the first week of the site we didn’t use the forum, we were taking the time to populate the site with some posts etc before releasing it.
Following steps from creating a new user registration is not going to tell you anything as the problem is already there, users can’t change their username and they don’t display on forums etc as stated before.
I was just reminded by a friend an hours ago that we did use a function to allow upper case characters for users, I’ve been looking for exact code that I used but can’t just yet…. I’ll keep looking. I had forgotten about this as it was only in for a short while at the beginning. Although I can’t remember, it is possible some of the initial users registered during its inclusion.
Edit: I should note that there is only the 8 team members signed up on the site, its not fully live yet, so editing usernames via database wouldn’t be an issue if it would help?
Group forums are separated by groups. Group forums require users to be part of the group in order to use the forum. This method can be good if you want to restrict usage of specific forums to specific groups of people.
Site wide forums is one centralised forum where users do not have to be part of a group in order to use it. This method is more like a regular forum.
When installing buddypress you can enable the forum component (doing so will give you the built in function for installing bbpress in either form), and later remove it in order to use site wide forums with the /forums slug.
Once its installed, delete the page “forums”, ensure its removed from the page trash.
Go to Buddypress > Components, and uncheck “Discussion Forums” and click save in order to disable to buddypress (group) forum component.
Double check that bbpress is using “forums” as the Forums base.
Go to permalinks and save to update.
Navigate to /forums on your site and you should be able to see the site wide forums. You will have to manually add forums to the main menu.
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Its unfortunate that BuddyPress was set up this way, I can see users wanting to have site wide forums more so than group forums, and will want them to be on the slug /forums. A better way would have been for them to use /group-forums or /user-forums for group forums, and /forums for site wide forums. Lets hope an update will rectify this.
