[@mercime]

.- edited –

[koreancandy]

No, I’m using the Buddypress group forums and I’m using multisite too

[@mercime]

I wish to change the number of forum topics displayed on a page.

@koreancandy Are you using bbPress forums plugin or not? Are you on single WP install or did you create a Network/multisite?

[koreancandy]

I can’t find this under settings

[ldjautobody]

Yessssss! Thanks @andrewteg! I was seriously beginning to think I dreamed the whole thing up…not sure why I could not find this page, but that is EXACTLY where I was.

Now, since I have found what I was looking for, I’d really like to get some opinions of the plugin and see if this will actually do what I am planning for this site. I am open to all opinions and suggestions. My understanding of BuddyPress and bbPress is coming along and the site is starting to look like what I envisioned. You can see the preliminary site at http://accessories.ldjautobody.com.

First, let me explain what I have planned for this site and, like I said, I am open to all suggestions and comments. I would like to hear what the experts have to say. Good or bad, I need your opinions. You ALL have great ideas and I respect whatever you might have to say or add. 🙂

This blog and forum are dedicated to custom car and motorcycle enthusiasts everywhere. Car enthusiasts are passionate about their subject, and in addition to giving them a place to share their projects and discuss those among each other, I would also like to let them post some articles, hoping that the fresh content will keep the search engines hanging out on the site and help boost the rankings. I have never run a forum site or used BuddyPress or bbPress before and I’m not really sure how this all works in relation to SEO. I do, however, deal with car and motorcycle enthusiasts on a daily basis and I know that I can most likely count on them to get some very good discussions going among themselves and that is my hope for this site.

We will also be doing some affiliate marketing from this site, and my hope is that in a perfect World, the fresh content and activity level of the site will keep us ranking well in the search engines and bring some new customers to the site. Since we are an “auto body shop”, our normal advertising is concentrated in a very local area. The affiliate site, however, will have a much broader range and we will be advertising nationwide vs. the small local area that the body shop is limited to. So my hope is that the increased activity on the site will increase the number of people visiting and also help us reach out well beyond our local area. At least, that is our goal for now!

Thank you all again for all of your help. I am looking forward to hearing anything my experts have to add as we move forward with getting the site ready to launch. 🙂

Denise

[@mercime]

@wpgoddess There could still be a way to salvage the situation with your premium theme. Open up your theme’s page.php file and Save As > buddypress.php file. Ask your theme dev that we need the_title() and the_content() in buddypress.php and that will facilitate compatibility process. Upload that revised buddypress.php into your theme folder in server. It’s possible that you might need to tweak some styling but you should be good to go.

Tip: if you have bbPress sitewide/group forums installed, you can copy the revised buddypress.php with the_title and the_content and Save As > bbPress.php and upload to theme folder in server as well.

[@mercime]

@hungrygolf best place to get assistance with the plugin is at plugin dev’s site forums. Did you add enable_multiblog per plugin instructions.

[@mercime]

@rairai-ni basic troubleshooting -> deactivate gantry plugin and change to Twenty Twelve theme and check if the issue is gone. If it is, then you have to contact the gantry plugin/theme dev about this issue or check out the gantry forums re BP issues.

[@mercime]

@koreancandy you can set number of topics to show at Settings > Forums panel.

[koreancandy]

This is the link: http://kpopcommunity.com/fanclub-forums/ and I am using the latest WordPress and Buddypress.

[@mercime]

@ivevera Thank you for posting back with the culprit, an SEO plugin as one of suspected conflicts. You could also post at that seo plugin author’s forums that it’s not “playing nice” with BuddyPress pages.

Marking this topic as resolved.

[@mercime]

@visualizeedits assuming you’ve found the bridge script between MyBB forum and WordPress, you would still be required to bridge MyBB with BuddyPress and Cubepoints unless you do not intend to record the activities of the members in your forums in their profile pages.

If you only need members to pay for some enhancements in their forum profiles, adding BuddyPress may be an overkill for your site. You might be better off just using s2member plugin.

[rcain]

ps. we also use (dreaded) captcha fields (plugin) on forms, but have noted of late there are bots out there (eg: XRummer, et al) scraping such captcha images off the web in order to seed simple AI scripts to bypass such protection. pretty clever stuff & born out by what we see in our logs.

[rcain]

@bp-help

good suggestions. thx. 2 of them r new to me, so other people may find them helpful also.

on our sites we r using::

Keith Graham’s most excellent ‘stop-spammer-registrations-plugin’ – https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

– has stopped over 53,000 spammers since feb this year! it uses external lookups on StopForumSpam, ProjectHoneyPot, BotScout, (Akismet, which we dont use), others – thus great collective benefit/advance warning of bad traffic. also traps brute force attacks (bad logins/registrations/comment posts, etc), etc. is simple enough to play nice with most plugins.

to try & keep as much load off the front-end of the server as possible, we also have set up:

linux iptables ( & ufw add on )- as the basis of all firewall stuff. also has our manually maintained blacklists & whitelists. various custom rule chains setup. takes a while to get your head around, but is essential.

linux fail2ban – essentially an add on to iptables, puts people in jail for bad behaviour – eg: brute force attacks against ssh, ftp, mail logins. we also have set up custom rules detecting bad activity against wp-login.php itself via fail2ban. am looking to do some more with this.

linux apache – mod-security2, libapache2-mod-evasive, libapache2-mod-antiloris, libapache2mod-spamhaus – which help protect against general bad behaviour, DDOS, blank header attacks, the infamous ‘Loris’ script (which we’ve experienced!), and bot-nets. still assessing how effective these r.

we have also had to tune apache on our VPS for resilience in the face of DDOS type attacks and heavy-handed brute force attacks.

some further good tips here: http://www.dannytsang.co.uk/index.php/apache-2-hardening-tips/ & elsewhere.

linux logwatch – reports various access stats (the good & the bad & the ugly) via email – very useful indeed for checking whther situation is under control (or not).

linux rkhunter – scans for rootkits on the server from time to time – just be sure – & particularly useful if u ever do get infected in hunting down the intruder’s code.

obviously we also have file system bolted down. (there is a good wp plugin to check permissions bolt-down, i forget what its called). we also spend a LONG time analysing logs etc.

anway, that takes care of many of the bad boys, but we r still left with the following problems to crack:

1) we have observed that many bad bots/scripts are exhibiting ‘learning behaviour’ (ie. heuristic) and r finding ways around fail2ban rules/jails, etc. in particular:

a) rotating IP addresses to match ‘ban counts’ – currently we have them wasting an IP address every 3-4 attempts, but they still seem to have an inexhaustable supply, else are spoofing extreamly well.

b) varying their retry period to match the length of jail sentence. (ie. they are not wasting their mips whilst in jail, just enough to detect when they are released,record it, and tune their future responses).

2) content scrapers, probes and bad-bots generally – these r wasting enormous resource on our servers. typically i would suggest such ‘bad traffic’ is responsible for over 50% of total server load (ie. not good at peak times on a busy site). additional problems we r facing here:

a) bad bots often spoof the agent string to pretend to be eg. google, bing, etc. the only way u can tell is by reverse lookup of ip address and try and match to one of well known range of ‘good bot’ addresses. but, despite fact that many ranges are well known, most of them are never actually published or confirmed, many are variable. i am not aware of any definitve list of ip addresses of good bots (though there is http://www.iplists.com/ whichis not bad, & http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/ which is often helpful – these are very much ‘best efforts/as seen in the wild’ lists.). this problem worsens with the rise of social network agregation services, other (legitimate) content agregators, and personal content aggregating software on mobiles, tablets, etc.

idea: i am thinking of writing a script/plugin/rule to do smart lookup of ip against good bots list, & to automatically maintain that (collective) list. ideally, this is a service that someone like spamhause, or projecthoneypot should offer, since they already have the infrastructure. but, we’ll see. the script will detect traffic ‘purporting to be a SE bot, of any kind and to ban it via iptables if it isnt in the approved list/doesnt check out. the risk is in false positives and harming ones SEO. anyone any thought in this area?

b) probes & sniffers hunting out wp/bp forms, ajax ports, plugin files, forms, etc – in advance of main attack by penatration/spamming bots. typically always use swiftly rotated ip’s. many many variants out there. usually they have no luck on our sites, but that does not stop them trying in vast numbers (bot-nets, collectives? hives?) and harming out response times, etc.

idea: url obfuscation has been brought up on this forum before, particularly for eg: login, registration, admin url’s, etc. i am thinking of creating a plugin to dynamically hash encode links of choice using someething based on wp forms nonce system. not only useful for causing probes & hackers pain, but also to help thwart media thieves. obviously, scripters will soon respond by just snanning for link titles in html, so not bullet proof in any way, but they will at least be on 1-time request code, so causing them page reload every request & less sophisticted scripts will be totally wasting their own time.

anyway. these have been my thought so far. would love to hear experience/insights of others.

unfortuntely wordpress & buddypress sites in particular represent the richest of prizes for hackers, content scrapers, spammers, etc – & they r really on our case. furthermore, there is some BIG money involved, from porn to pharma to credit card fraud; that means some very smart programmers being paid excellent rates, to hack our systems, full time. add to that, the 10’s of millions of infected machines out there (often unknowingly) operating as botnet drones, trying to pernetrate our servers 24×7, steal our machine resources and steal our members personal data. it is a war of attrition.

all further experience, ideas welcome, here.

[minigamers]

Hello.
I’ve installed buddypress and the only error given was that related to bb-config.php location, but i cancelled bp-forums because i don’t need it.
My problem is that i can’t create groups.
I have the groups section, i’ve even installed groups pages plugin and still can’t do it.
On my profile page it showes me group section also but still can’t create groups.
I have other questions related to buddypress but i realy need to get somewhere with this one first.

[dmd54]

@bp help – please read your comment and realize how it addresses nothing, and in no way uses deductive reasoning to try and come to a solution, which is the point of a forum. Rather you come across as arrogant and condescending and in no way helpful.

[Hugo Ashmore]

Waiting for asnwers.

And did you do as I suggested and contact the theme author? I note you gloss over my comments.

You reference a second screen shot yet I see none? When I visit those links you’ve added I see no registration page, just a page that has no content being generated just empty markup elements, the site does not look as though it is running BuddyPress, have you de-activated for some reason?

You need to provide clear links to the issue if you want help, but as I said earlier the BP support forum is not aimed at dedicated custom theme support so help will be limited.

[Hugo Ashmore]

It’s not a bug as such but either a lack of correct properties for a ruleset or malformed markup, however without knowing what code is involved it’s not really possible to help, also this is a custom theme and therefore not really something this forum can deal with.

I suggest contacting the theme author for help on this.

The issue is suggestive of float clearing not being taken into account but as I say without sight of code not possible to say with certainty.

Are you running in theme compat mode or trying to run with the older template pack plugin?

[dmd54]

@mercime

I am using MAMP. When I installed the plugin I set the register page to a new blank sign up page. when I installed the plugin there was no register or activate page created, that’s why I changed the setting to a new page. If I navigate to that page the site appears but there is no sign up or account registration form. It’s just a blank page.

I am using the responsive theme and I would try using another theme to see if it works, however, I deleted the bb plugin to try reinstalling but now can not. I just receive this error –

“An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with WordPress.org or this server’s configuration. If you continue to have problems, please try the support forums.”

Thanks for the help

[bp-help]

@rcain
Activity Stream Throttling done courtesy of BuddyDev:

BuddyPress Rate Limit User Activity

Limit friendship request throttling done courtesy of BuddyDev:

BuddyPress Limit Friendship Request

Private Message Rate limit plugin includes throttling coming soon from BuddyDev

Many captcha solutions have been out there for years.

I covered a hidded registration form field in a plugin here:
https://github.com/bphelp/bp-spam-killer

I doubt this covers everything but the fight against spam is ongoing. So you have my support! 🙂

[katumos]

hi @mercime this is the site http://www.habakwahaba.com/ what i basically want is groups for
Real Estate
Stocks
Techprenuers
Stocks

each group has a forum .i would like each of the group to have forums on a separate page .earlier i put bbpress but the css is not pleasing .plus i want the members of fthe groups to interact .

I would be glad if you assist

[@mercime]

@katumos the individual group forums do appear on separate pages. What exactly do you mean?

[@mercime]

Peace.

@dmd54 I can understand your frustration with a problematic installation and know that you want help asap. Remember though all who help out in the forums are volunteers from all over the world with different ways of responding to questions posted here. What’s kosher for some may be impudent to others. Moving on…

i have the register page set to my sign up page but nothing appears.

– You mean you created a blank page with title/slug for registration, and then assigned that page to Registration in Settings > BuddyPress > Pages, right?
– What do you mean when you say nothing appears? Is it white screen in front and no source view or do you just see the title Register (or slug you chose) and no registration forms below?
– Are you on MAMP, WAMP, or XAMPP?
– Are you using a custom theme or have you tried using Twenty Twelve theme or the BP Default theme?
– Yes Register page and Activate page are separate because each page has a different function.

[bp-help]

@dmd54

if someone could offer advice i would appreciate it.

You asked for advice and I gave it to you.

That was about the most useless response anyone could have provided.

Given your demeanor don’t expect anyone to spoon feed what you did wrong when you supplied little information to begin with and when someone offers friendly advice you make a rude comment. Search the forums for similar issues and study the codex.

[ldjautobody]

@bphelp, Wow and thank you for the awesome tutorial. This is perfect! I was actually using the original site I put up as a tempsite until I had the whole Buddy Press and bbpress thing figured out. I am in the process now of building our new site which will up be and running shortly.

The information you sent me is great. The register and log-in pages are wonderful. I am probably going to have to make some changes to our WP theme as I found out just recently that they have published a bbpress child theme which works great with the original WP theme. In fact, I’ll even give them a little plug here…Mysitemyway.com has some awesome premium wordpress themes that are definitely work a “look see” by anyone that is light on WP coding and wants a truly beautiful theme! So there guys…there’s your “plug’o the day!” from LDJ! LOL

Since learning a bunch of new things playing with the old temp site, the new site is going to be formatted completely different. I owe it to everyone here for their help during this learning curve and thank you everybody for all your great advice.

I’ll put up the new url as soon as I get the stuff up and running and I know I’ll be back here to get more help as we move forward with our forum site.

Thanks again for all your help!

Denise (@ldjautobody) 🙂