[kalico]

Note: All plugins and WP are up to date as of this writing. The site can be found at http://nrocnetwork.org/community. However, that is the only part of the site that is public. There are several sites in the multisite that are in development.

I have a multisite with BuddyPress (network activated, but rooted in a subsite by a define in wp-config) and I have Commons in a Box (CBOX), which includes bbPress. Unfortunately, I have made the mistake of activating and deactivating CBOX, and I think that some settings got changed in between. I’m seeing some very odd behavior.

My first clue to this problem was a “disappearing” forum. Someone made a private group, associated a forum with it, posted in it….then it disappeared. Any member of the group (including admin, mod, and participant) would see a message saying “This group does not have a forum.”

As superadmin I could visit the group, click on the forum link, and it would display just fine. But no one else could. This made me think it was a permissions problem, but all efforts in that direction failed to resolve the issue.

So I looked around more, and eventually discovered a lot of weird behavior (will explain below), in particular, the forum would not “stick” to the group through any means of association. This only happens with private groups/forums.

I ran all the forum-fixing tools in Tools >> Forums (individually, not at once), but to no avail. In fact, the one for reassociating groups and forums says “0 forums, 0 groups” etc. even though there should be 11+ groups and like 15 forums.

The forum/group association in the dropdown menu in admin does not show all the possible forums I should see. i.e., if I go to Network Admin >> Groups >> Some Private Group, and check for an associated forum, the “Yes, I want a forum” box is checked, but the forum that should be associated either is not associated, OR it’s not even in the list at all. If I make a private forum public, it will reappear in the dropdown menu.

However, I was unable to make the association “stick” when setting the forum from the admin side. Eventually I did it from the front end, on the Group >> Settings >> Forum page, where there is a dropdown to select which forum to associate with the group. But it should have it’s own private forum from when it was created….it should not have to be a public forum.

Some older private groups have lost their connection with their forums in the same way — their members cannot see the forum, they just see “This group does not have a forum.” And the other abnormalities exist as well.

I noticed that several subsites have similar lists of forums/topics/replies, but the actual count of items varies for each subsite.

Forum URLs (permalinks) vary, depending on which subsite I am on when viewing the Forums. Some have a /forums/ slug in them, some do not. Some share a slug with the subsite I am viewing, while others have the slug of the site where they *should* live.

I’m confused and frustrated. :[

Ideally, all forums/topics/replies should live on one subsite (the same one where BuddyPress is rooted). Private forums should be associated with their private groups, and private groups’ forums should be visible to their members. Y’know….obvious stuff like that.

I really suspect that my sites/forums/groups and their associations have gotten whacked out by something I did, but I have no idea how to fix it. I feel like if bbPress were active in just the subsite where BuddyPress is rooted, it might work right….but I don’t know how to get there from here (without breaking everything, or losing posts). CBOX is a network-only plugin, and that may be partly responsible for this mess….it was active a few months ago, then I disabled it for a while, then re-enabled it. I suspect some groups/forums may have been made in the intervening time, and did not properly associate.

I am open to any suggestions for how I can get this all back to how it should be — with or without CBOX. I only want one site to have forums and groups. They don’t need to be everywhere.

CBOX as a plugin manager can be eliminated — I am not married to the additional functionality it provides. In fact, I already have the CBOX plugins “freed up” for administrative maintenance outside of the CBOX gui by a define in wp-config, so I am not locked in there.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! 🙂

[kalico]

I may have managed to shake out some of these issues by de-network-activating bbPress, and re-activating it just on the root BuddyPress site. I rebooted my permalinks on that site, and that part seems to be improved.

However, I still have the core problem: Private forums are not associated with their private groups. Users see a message that says

When I try to repair those relationships (groups/forums) the message says, “Repairing BuddyPress group-forum relationships… Complete! 0 groups updated; 0 forums updated; 0 forum statuses synced.”

[sharmavishal]

bbpress is network activated or site activated?

[kalico]

Hi @sharmavishal ! Thanks for asking! bbPress was network activated initially (the CBOX plugin activates everything network-wide; it is a “network only” plugin). But as per my last post, I deactivated it from CBOX and activated it just on the one subsite (the root blog for BuddyPress).

After some additional testing tonight, I’ve narrowed down the problem a bit more. At least I know which CBOX plugin is causing the problem:

1) I deactivated all the CBOX plugins, except for BuddyPress. Tested forums/groups and it all appears to be associated properly. The users can see the private forums in private groups. Yay!

2) I activated the “Group Email Subscriptions” plugin via CBOX, since that one is very important to our existing setup. Forums/groups associations are still working fine. Yay again!

3) I activated the “Docs” plugin via CBOX, and WHAMM! It clobbered my forum visibility! Now only admin can see forums on the front end “group” pages. I tried deactivating it from CBOX (which makes it network-wide) then activating it just on the root site for BuddyPress, and it still has the same breaking effect.

We really need “Docs” working, so now the focus is on figuring out why Docs is breaking the forums.

I suppose my next step will be deactivating other plugins to see if one of them is causing a conflict with “Docs”.

I hope someone has an idea to share! 🙂

[sharmavishal]

Interesting….with your last test how is bbpress activated?

[kalico]

Same as it was, @sharmavishal. Just on the one site.

[sharmavishal]

Try network activated once

[r-a-y]

@kalico – You should post your question on the CBOX forums:

About the Project

If the problem is with Docs, do post a bug report here:
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/buddypress-docs

You could also try upgrading to the latest version of BuddyPress Docs to see if that fixes your problem.

[kalico]

Thanks @r-a-y – I actually came back here just now with exactly that thought in mind, now that it’s been narrowed down. Thanks for providing the links. 🙂

I’ll head on over there and summarize the issue as it now stands.