Reply To: Private group topics appearing in activity stream. Help!
This is definitely part of the problem that I’m having. It turns out that there’s a bug in bbPress 2.4 that does not allow the admin to make a Forum ‘private’ or ‘hidden’. At the moment, the only workaround is to use the bulk edit facility to apply the ‘private’ setting to a forum (but, not, sadly the ‘hidden’ attribute as of yet).
In other words, if you go into the forum setting for the individual forum on the back-end and change the attribute there, it won’t stick. The forum comes back again as ‘Public’.
I used the build editor to change my forum to ‘Private’ and that stopped the replies to topic posts from being broadcast to everyone in the buddypress sitewide activity page. Now, I’m waiting for the ability to make the forums ‘hidden’ for extra security. In the meantime, I’ve been using s2member to lock down the content of the bbPress Group forum. This ONLY works for Group forums, because their topics have a forum-specific URI structure (so URI-restrictions can be used; e.g. ‘/group/<name of group>/forum/’)… whereas non-Group forums just have the ‘/topic/’ URI which is sitewide and cannot be restricted by a particular forum name. This is lamentable, as bbPress is very hard to lock-down otherwise.
It’s taken me many hours to track down all of these niggly problems, which is frustrating, since bbPress and buddypress are meant to be integrated now. So, it seems as if the integration is mucky.
Given all the user confusion regarding forum attributes in bbPress and forum security in buddypress, I would really love to see the development teams come up with a simple, unified interface for managing memberships and access restrictions. Otherwise, we’ll all end up chasing settings in different places, without really understanding their interplay.
