[fmckinnon]

Dan,
Thanks so much for your help. I’ve enlisted some people in our existing forums to signup in our staging area and poke around a few days and see what they think as well.

The main aim of my site: to make it more inclusive to the members .. meaning, right now, we have thousands of people who read the articles but never engage. The only people we get added to our mailing list are forum members, so yes – one of main aims is to grow the mailing list and membership base.

Time to manage? not a problem, we have lots of devoted forum members who are happy to volunteer as mods/admins.

As you pointed out, we do have the global forum currently (via vBulletin) so initially, the “sitewide forums” would make the most sense. If we did that, I’m not sure we even need to bother with creating groups. But, on the surface, to me — it feels like “Groups” are one of the biggest draws to BuddyPress that makes it more social …

When you say “you can remove this feature in some places” – can you elaborate? Can the status updates/comments inside of Groups be turned off, only allowing discussion via the group forum?

[fmckinnon]

Hey Dan,
Yeah – I understand that – spent a lot of time reading, and have installed BuddyPress and bbPress on my staging domain.

I’ve experimented around w/ the Groups features (including allowing a Group to have a forum, etc). At this point, I realize I’m getting into personal preference …so with that being understood, here’s my question:

What’s the real point of Status Update/Activity Streams in the individual groups in BuddyPress if you are going to be also having forums via bbPress? It seemed and felt cluttered and redundant to me.

Like I created a group called “Songwriters” and linked it to the “Songwriters” forum. But, members of the Group can post status updates in the Group, that don’t show up in the forum. And if a member of the group posts in the forum, it does show up in the “forum” section of the group, but doesn’t show up in the activity feed for the group.

It almost feels like the two spaces are competing, I’m not sure I follow the rationale. Again, I realize it’s preference, but in your opinion, if you are going to utilize bbPress forums, is it best to just turn groups off?

What I’m trying to prevent is having the “group” discussions having in two separate areas. I can see how you’d have some discussion happening in the forum, and then someone else may post a topic as a “status update” in the group, and start getting comments there.

Does this make sense?

[fmckinnon]

Ah ok interesting. I understand they are two different plugins .. I just wasn’t sure how they could be married together for the end-user .. and this is still a bit cloudy to me.