BuddyPress.org

Thanks for the post, and thank you everyone that chimed in to alert the OP about the protocol for security concerns. Understanding it’s possible there’s a communication gap here, this topic does also read (to my eyes) as condescending & inflammatory, which is honestly not going to yield a very positive conversation. I think y’all did a great job staying positive, and I for one greatly appreciate that.

To be clear to anyone else that runs into this topic, what the OP sees is not a BuddyPress or bbPress bug; this is WordPress doing it’s best to show published content from public post types.

About BuddyPress:
* Neither BuddyPress nor bbPress modify this core behavior
* BuddyPress does not use this interface; bbPress does
* The .org sites have not disabled this, they just do not have any unusual content to leak

The gist:
* If plugins allow for private content, it’s up to those plugins to protect it
* If you create roles with content limitations, it’s up to you to confirm they’re working

For anyone looking to modify or restrict content that appears in this list, use the wp_link_query_args and wp_link_query filters to do so.

Here is how WordPress calculates the results in this list. Note that it only uses published posts from public post-types:

$pts = get_post_types( array( 'public' => true ), 'objects' );
$pt_names = array_keys( $pts );

$query = array(
	'post_type' => $pt_names,
	'suppress_filters' => true,
	'update_post_term_cache' => false,
	'update_post_meta_cache' => false,
	'post_status' => 'publish',
	'posts_per_page' => 20,
);

WordPress has a built-in way to calculate privacy scope using 'perm' => 'readable' and even that is not used here (though bbPress does use this in its own loops.) WordPress instead takes a strict position of published public content by default.

If anything unexpected is appearing here, it is not because of BuddyPress or bbPress, and we are still happy to help anyone discover the source of this in a new & more friendly topic.

As far as I know, in order to reply to a specific participant only, they’d need to start a new private message. Unless that’s done, as you pointed out, the reply will go to all participants.

I have come across the same issue recently. Seems still to be the default. Did you find anything else to resolve this? Otherwise I guess it is a custom code job to get hidden and private group forums to be showing on a users profile.

As I’ve suggested forget about changing functionality of private groups and instead focus on public groups and employing the alternate control public group plugin to lock public groups down to require membership requests so they act similar to Private Groups. And then you won’t need to reinvent the wheel concerning Private Group functionality.
Basically look at your problem from another angle and focus on modifying Public Group functionality over Private Group functionality as you’ll have a much easier time with that approach.
Cheers

Hi @sprocketbuddy,

As @imath notes in his video trying to get private groups to function ‘publicly’ is going to be quite difficult as it’s ingrained in the core.

You’ll want to start with his plugin (https://github.com/imath/altctrl-public-group) and customize to your needs. As Public Groups by default have Group content and activity visible to any user by employing his plugin you’ll achieve the options you desire with introducing membership requests to the public group but still display it’s members, content, activity.

Hope that helps get you started in the right direction. Try it out and let me know what roadblocks you hit and we can probably assist.

Cheers

Hi @sprocketbuddy,

Take a look at this plugin by @imath;
https://github.com/imath/altctrl-public-group

I believe it goes along with your needs. He found rather than hacking/rewritting permission things for private groups that it was easier to utilize a public group and just lock it down with more controls.

There’s a demo here;

Cheers

Private group options are

1. Only users who request membership and are accepted can join the group.
2. This group will be listed in the groups directory and in search results.
3. Group content and activity will only be visible to members of the group.

To modify option 3, you can code something.
Read from here.

Update.
– The group list private/hidden can now be seen in the edit mode of the topic. Although the group stops access to actually posting the topic onto the group the users doesn’t have access to. So as far as I can tell, although direct url access I haven’t tested, the user cannot read the private forums, topics from a group.

things that eed to be resolved
– removing the groups list forums from the edit mode as showing all the private and hidden group on the site isn’t ideal.
– the user can now see and view any private forums that are in non-group forums.
– possible direct url access to the group forums.

Hello,

I was experiencing the same issue, although this is quite an old topic now, I thought I would add my bit.
– So site admin gets to see all the topics, and forums from all groups types without issue
– normal user just see’s the public groups on their profile. – fine for someone that is viewing their profile but not for the user, who would like to see all relevant stuff from the site on one place.
– I have found adding the capability to read private topics, and hiddden topics to the subscriber role sorts out the problem. Using the “members” plugin to scope the roles out.

This is after building a clean site and going through all these setups to ensure it was not custom development that has caused any issues.

– So now I need to now if the user can now see all private forums/topics from all hidden groups / private groups at any point. This would obviously be a major problem for users with private content.

I will look into this further, but it is frustrating that these points are not covered in bbpress setup as a few lines of information on this would have cleared up this issue straight away. I do value the fact everyone is doing this in their spare time though.

Do you have the private messages component activated?