Apologies for my rant!
I managed to resolve this issue by creating all the member forums first from WP dashboard and then assigning them to the appropriate groups from the members forum setting page from the front end.
It appears the issue lies with BuddyPress when trying to create member forums from the front end using the ‘allow group to have its own forum’ setting.
Why can I not create topics in my group forums!?
This is ridiculous. I keep getting ‘There was an error when creating the topic’ yet it shows as being created in the groups home feed but forums tab is empty as there are no topics!
Its strange that this feature works when a group has no members or forums associated with it.
Please help!!
