In theory if you set your group to “Private” or “Hidden” then non-group members are not supposed to be able to see the posts in that group’s bbForum.
However, and this is denied by the developers, I am experiencing a bug which is making all forum posts appear in the site-wide activity stream to all members, although when they click on the link they cannot view the post.
BuddyPress groups can’t have categories associated with them. My advice would be to just set up a different group for each island. You can make each group private to ensure that only members of that group can see the forum posts within.
Additionally, there is a plugin which will give groups hierarchies if you wanted to make it easier to group groups together (eg, if your islands are grouped geographically you could have a “north islands” group and a “south islands” group and within each group you would then have your individual islands groups).
Will there ever be a resolution to this problem? BP 1.8 with bbPress 2.3.2 on WP 3.6 still sees forum posts in Private groups appearing in non-group members’ activity streams!
I’ve just had the same problem. There’s a few steps I took to fix it, any one of them might have been the magic one, but taken together they solved the problem:
Go to Settings > Forum and change the Default User Role to keymaster
Tick Auto role
Click Save Changes
Set Default User Role back to Participant
Click Save Changes
If you have a user role editing plugin, go to it, or if not, install one
Edit the Administrator role and make sure that Manage forums is applied (there might be others, so make sure that anything that sounds forum-related is also checked).
Sorry, should have said first time round – I’m using a self-developed child of Buddypress Default theme. I only made a child theme because I needed some custom page templates for some non-BP related stuff. Everything BP-related is handled by BP Default.
I have tried it with the BP Default theme, and I have turned off all other plugins. I have even reinstalled the BP plugin.
I have now found the thing to turn the group forums (legacy) back on, but it makes no difference.
Thanks. Any thoughts or insights would be much appreciated.
I use the Private Buddypress plugin – it’s very simple and locks the whole site down, with the option to exclude the front page or blog pages if you want, otherwise everything gets password protected and only shown to logged-in users.
