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.
cf: https://buddypress.org/support/topic/private-group-posts-appearing-in-activity-stream-to-non-members
So, no, you’re not going crazy 😉 and yes, it is incredibly frustrating!
Peter
It’s unfair to say that we (the developers) are denying it. If we can recreate an issue, then it’s something we can fix. If we can’t recreate the issue but you can, it means we’re not testing in exactly the same way that you are, or that there’s something specific to your WordPress installation that’s affecting BuddyPress in some way. Clear, step-by-step instructions on how to recreate the bug help us track it down.
If you can update here or on that bbPress trac ticket, @petervandoorn, with those precise step-by-step instructions and as much detail as possible about your WordPress configuration, we can figure out a solution together.
Thanks.
@jboye @petervandoorn –
There was a bug in a previous version of bbPress where the visibility of the private and hidden forums were not being saved properly.
The bug is fixed in bbPress 2.4, but for previous group forums, you’ll need to repair them.
You can do this by:
- Logging in to the WP admin dashboard
- Navigate to “Tools > Forums”
- Make sure to check “Recalculate private and hidden forums”
- Lastly, hit “Repair Forums”
This will regenerate bbPress’ internal private and hidden forum IDs that are used to filter posts and will therefore fix forum visibility problems.
I tried running the Tools > Forums but it only solved the problem of new topic posts, but not replies to those posts. Here’s my rundown of the situation:
I think the problem has to do with buddypress – bbPress integration.
The bbPress Group Forums appear to be set to ‘Open’ by default, even if they are hidden within buddypress. In fact, I cannot alter this. I tried changing my secret forum to ‘hidden’ within bbPress (2.4) and it won’t save the change – it always comes back as ‘open’.
Therefore, it’s up to buddypress to manage the privacy of the forum. It seems to be doing this with new topic posts (I can confirm that hide_sitewide in the activity stream table is “1” for new posts). The problem is that if someone replies to that post, the hide_sitewide for that reply is set to “0”, even though it’s inside of a ‘hidden’ group forum. To me, this is a serious security breach, as it exposes the forum name, the original topic name, and the contents of the reply in EVERYONE’s Activity stream, whether they are logged in or not, a member of the hidden forum or not.
I can now confirm that there are problems between the integration of bbPress 2.4 and buddypress 1.81.
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.
I’m experiencing a simular problem with bp groups and bbpress. If my group admins change their group settings from public to private, the forum type doesn’t. The forum tools doesn’t fix it.
WP 3.8
BP 1.8.1
BBPRESS 2.5.2
Thanks!
Daniel
Confirming this bug, which lead to some drama on our forum. You think private topics are private, but turned out that if you click on the last reply links from a private forum, you sometimes can get in even when you don’t belong to the group. Not funny.
Also, subforums don’t inherit the settings from their parent forum.
@inget Sound like issues probably better raised or made on the bbPress support forums.
Having the same issue. I see it hasn’t been solved.
If someone would be kind enough to detail precisely how to duplicate the bug you’re experiencing in a new ticket over at bbpress.trac.wordpress.org, I’ll be happy to look into this further.
We’ve made great strides on the bbPress/forums integration in the past few years. If there are still lingering wrinkles, we’ll get them ironed out.
