Hidden Groups and Forums not showing for members of them
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I am running the current versions of everything as of today’s date… BuddyPress 2.2.3, bbPress 2.5.7 on WordPress 4.1.1
The problem I am having is that, for the most part, I only want either Public or Hidden groups with their associated forums.
The directory listing only displays the public groups and the forums only display the public forums.
As a Site Admin and Keymaster, I can’t even see the hidden groups (although the count increases to show the additional number of hidden groups). In fact, none of the hidden groups show under the ‘My Groups’ tab for me or any user who is a member of a particular hidden group (although the count indicates that they area member of this non-visible group that they can’t get access to). I can see the forums, however.
Essentially, the Hidden function appears to not be working for groups and forums as neither admins nor members of them can gain access without being provided with the URL.
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With further testing I have resolved that HIDDEN FORUMS will show for Moderators and Keymasters (as per bbPress documentation).
HIDDEN GROUPS not showing for anyone (keymasters, moderators of group members) in BuddyPress under ‘All Groups’ or ‘My Groups’ tabs. Only Public and Private groups show. The count of groups indicates the appropriate numbers however…
Hi There …
I’m noticing this too – But I’m new to Buddypress, has this always been the case?
Crucially, I think someone who is a member of a group, should see the forums/topics from the group forums they are members of on the Forum Index.
‘Hidden’ should only apply to non-members
Does anyone know if this is correct behaviour/ how it’s always been?
Thanks
I first installed BuddyPress on our site a couple years ago and all worked as expected. However, it was decided we wouldn’t pursue BuddyPress as part of our solution at the time. Earlier this year, we decided to re-instate it, which is when I noticed this new behavior…
There have been a lot of updates in WordPress, BuddyPress and bbPress during this time, so I’m guessing something somewhere along the line, but may not have been addressed yet. I haven’t found any fixes online for it, which is why I have posted here.
Just to clarify, HIDDEN FORUMS appear for Keymasters and Moderators, but not to members of them who haven’t been assigned to either of these roles. They can, however, access the forum if they have the URL for it. So, at the moment, I am having to make all members of hidden forums be moderators in order to keep my site navigation clean.
Perhaps @bphelp could shed some light?
Hi, I actually came here to see if anyone else had found a resolution for this issue. I have found one template that displays the ‘hidden’ groups as they should be shown on the relevant profiles but after several comments from people on the forums decided to go with a different theme yet I am unable to find one that still displays the hidden groups on the profiles (one is just a group with no forum but a chatroom as it’s used for weekly meetings so it wouldn’t even be possible to find it using ‘most recent posts.’.
Any advice/information would be greatly appreciated. Hidden groups are important to the running of my site as they are where the mods meet to discuss any issues and have some time away from the rest of the forum, but they are of no use if even the members of them can’t find them.
I am finding if i add a public/private forum to a group it will work fine. If i change the forum status to hidden it is no longer available to the group. If i set the forum back to private/public, it is still not part of the forum. The only way I can assign a forum to this group is to create a new one. Less than ideal.
Hi @donalconlon,
Have you tried going into the group via the back-end instead of editing them from the front-end? This works on my site.
From the Dashboard, select Groups then edit the group you wish to change.
In the Discussion Forum box in the right column, below the Settings box, tick the box Yes, I want this group to have a forum. Then, if you click in the Group Forum: selection box directly below that says (No Forum) A list of all your existing forums (public, private and hidden) should appear for you to select from. Click Save Changes and it should be working.
If you aren’t familiar with the back-end editing or groups, you might be interested to know that you can Add New Members to the group and Manage Member roles here too. Those parts are directly below the Name and Description box. If you can’t see any of these options, you might have to select screen options in the top right and tick their selection boxes to get them to show below.
Hope this helps!
I tried it on some of the default WordPress themes and couldn’t get it to work… and it no-longer works on the previous theme used two years ago when I first configured BuddyPress on our site.
My suggested work-around for you until someone is able to get it going again would be to create a password-protected or private page in WordPress for your mods to chat via the comments function. If you use a plugin that allows menu items to only be shown to mods, then no one will know the page even exists.
I use Nav Menu Roles to manage the visibility of menu items on my site. Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with my theme’s menu… so every time I want to add or change a menu item’s visibility, I have to change to another theme to use it , then change back. Clumsy, but it works! https://wordpress.org/plugins/nav-menu-roles/screenshots/
Hi @canwigirl,
Unfortunately, that won’t work for me, mostly because the groups are already in use and have been for over a month. I don’t use the actual comments/blogging functionality of WordPress at all on my site at all and asking the users to repost a large number of the conversations so that they could continue would be unfeasible. Really I want to know why this particular functionality is included on the forum build if it doesn’t work in the majority (make that the largest majority) of templates (Firmasite is the only one I have found where the hidden groups actually appear but it has certain appearance issues that it doesn’t appear to be able to correct without a large amount of additional coding).
How many groups like this do you have?
Another solution would be to provide the members with the direct URL to the group… Again, you could look at using a plugin which will only show to users that meet certain credentials (either via menu or a sidebar widget).
When I tested, members of the group could still see the activity stream, it just doesn’t show up in the directory of groups or under ‘My Groups’
To find the group URL… Make sure it is allocated to your forum, then look at all your forums, click on the particular one you are after and, at the top of the screen, you will see that it is associated with a hidden group. Click on the avatar for the croup, and you go to the group’s activity stream. Copy the URL and use it either as a link in the menu, on a button, or whatever else suits your format… If you don’t want it to be visible to other users, use a widget or plugin that allows you to show it only to who you want to see it.
I have two such groups – both with different memberships.
I have provided the users with the URL but that relies upon them either remembering it or constantly referring to their email.
I have looked at using a further plugin but I have about 9 already for the forum functionality alone, and the more php functions I call during a page load the slower my site becomes (because of the set up of my site at the host level – something I have no control over).
I have also used all the widget slots that I feel comfortable with (about 5 on the page) in order to ensure that the layout is neither too cluttered nor too messy (I find the more stuff you use the less pleasant the site is to look at) – I work for a charity for the visually impaired and one thing we discovered was that users – no matter what their visual capabilities – didn’t like a cluttered page.
I will continue to look, but really my point is that if there is a piece of functionality in something then it should work – UAT isn’t hugely expensive (part of my professional job as it happens) and that is something which would have failed it – it would be nice if there were clear guidelines on which templates (including the core ones) worked with the hidden/private group settings before they were used – I have spent so many hours mucking around with templates only for them to fail at that last hurdle (the groups not appearing) it’s getting rather frustrating.
@bewitchingfiction, @caniwigirl,
have you read group forum install instruction ?
Note also that for hidden group
Only users who are invited can join the group.
This group will not be listed in the groups directory or search results.
Group content and activity will only be visible to members of the group.Members who are part of such a group can see their group activity on their profile, when they’re logged-in.
On a correctly installed BP, user can access to hidden group forums via the profile, the group activity itself or the group forum.
This how BP handles members and how bbPress is built. And has nothing to do with a standard coded theme.
If you don’t believe, try by activating one of Twenty default theme.Hi @danbp, Thanks for joining this discussion.
When I first looked into running BuddyPress on my site a couple years ago, Hidden groups did appear for members of them as outlined by BuddyPress. However, this is no longer the case.
Yes, members can access them if they have the URL for the Hidden Groups’s activity stream…
Yes, members can access them via the forums…
BUT hidden groups do not appear to members of them, moderators, admins or keymasters in any of the group directory pages or member/user profile pages or menus which link to ‘All Groups’ or ‘My Groups’. However, the group count increases to show the number of all groups, be they public, private or hidden.
From https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/installing-group-and-sitewide-forums/
List of Groups created in the site including time active stamp, group description, number of members and group privacy setting. Only Public and Private Groups are seen in list by regular members. Super/Site Admin sees all groups including Hidden groups. – NOT working
My Groups… List of Groups you are a member of – Public, Private and Hidden (only by you and Super Admin) – NOT working
Is this what you are experiencing @bewitchingfiction?
Hi @caniwigirl,
That is exactly what I am experiencing. As I said, I have found one template that displays all the groups but the display on other things (as it hasn’t been updated in a while) has stopped working properly so it is a template I am looking to remove in the near future – as soon as I find a template that displays all the hidden groups to the people who are members of them.
Hi @caniwigirl
Yes, i tried it from the back-end. The only way I can get a forum to display with a group is if I make the forum public. It will not work for either private or hidden :(.
What is your theme and which plugins do you use ?
Have you already tried with 2015 theme ?I have tried with multiple themes, including the 2015, 14 and 13. I am currently using Firmasite (which works but isn’t the most user-friendly in other ways). I have BBpress, Buddypress, Mailchimp for WordPress, Akismet (activated), Buddypress Group Chat, Buddypress Security Check, Jetpack. I try and keep the plugins to a minimum as my WordPress site is only used for the forums – I use efiction in a subfolder for the main part of my site.
Deactivate all plugins except BuddyPress & bbPress and test with 2013.
Thanks @danbp
I’ve just tried it on twenty thirteen (the latest update yesterday) and the groups work perfectly, even for my test user who is a forum participant and contributor for WordPress AND member of two hidden groups. I had tested it previously, but it did’t work on the previous version of the theme. I didn’t even have to deactivate any plugins.
I then tested it with all the themes from 2011-2015 and they all work too.
So… It looks like I need to take this back to my theme developers… Can you please give me so info that I can relay to them so they can get the hidden groups displaying correctly? Or, is it possible to copy the appropriate BuddyyPress files from one of the WordPress themes and put it somewhere in the child theme of the theme I am using? If so… Which ones and where would I find them?
The theme I am using integrates BuddyPress in it, but not in any great detail.
Hi, I have tested with all, had to deactivate things like Jetpack which then had to be re-activated. I am still experiencing the same issues. The page still looks like the screenshot attached below
I deactivated the plugins one by one but it made no difference at all.
Help?
what happens probably is an ajax issue, due to some missing or old class and/or ID names.
Compare at first your (custom or third party) theme page.php with the one coming with Twenty theme. Compare also js versions of your custom theme to Twenty’s one…
Difficult to say from here. 😉do you have a page called groups in your page admin and is this page showing on BP settings page tab ? Have you pretty permalinks activated ?
If page exist, which is the slug you see ?
If you have several trashed pages, specially if some related to groups, clear the trash definetly.Handling with themes is much more easy today as a few years back. Many things have been modified and as you probably know, BP is now theme independant, under condition you use a theme respecting WP standarts.
All theme files related to BP are now in bp-templates/bp-legacy/buddypress.
See Codex for more details about how to use it.
Hi @danbp,
I have a page called ‘groups’ I have permalinks activated and the slug for the groups page is:
http://www.bewitching-fiction.com/groups/
I have no trash, the only pages I actually have on the site that are WordPress are related to the blog, there are just 7 pages in total on the whole site 🙂 I believe in minimalism.
That is what my screen looks like… I have passed on the message from @danbp to my theme’s developers to look into.
<b>Have you updated the WordPress themes to the absolute latest?</b> They issued updates earlier this week. The previous versions resulted in the same problem, but the current ones worked fine for me.
My site is a relatively big one… with lots going on. But, my host advised me not to use Jetpack because they have found a number of conflicts/issues with some of the components. Hence, I have to find, test and use other plugins to get the functionality I am after.
Good news everyone. My theme developers and I have solved this issue on the theme I am using!
The first tricky hurdle was discovering a !important directive in the main.css of the theme for handling .hidden so I removed it to become
.hidden{display:none;visibility:hidden}so styling in my child theme would work.In my child theme, I did an ‘inspect element’ to discover that the hidden groups were listed as:
<li> class='odd hidden is-admin is-member">_</li> <li> class='even hidden is-admin is-member">_</li>So, I added the following code to my style.css in the child theme
.odd.hidden.is-admin.is-member { display: block; visibility: visible; } .even.hidden.is-admin.is-member { display: block; visibility: visible; }This worked for admin, but not members of the groups who weren’t admins so… Logged in as one of those and using ‘inspect element’ I found that private groups were listed as:
<li> class='odd hidden is-admin is-member">_</li> <li> class='even hidden is-admin is-member">_</li>Applying the same logic as above, I added the following code to my style.css
.odd.hidden.is-member { display: block; visibility: visible; } .even.hidden.is-member { display: block; visibility: visible; }And now everything works 🙂
I don’t know if anyone at BuddyPress support can help tidy up my code, but it does the trick and I hope it helps you @bewitchingfiction @donalconlon @olay And thanks for your help @danbp
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.
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