The difference is the activity stream does not offer a title for your discussion, forums do and are logically organized accordingly.
You can try disabling the site wide activity stream by not setting the activity stream as front page to see if that will encourage group discussion.
FWIW, the default BP theme has received some criticism regarding usability.
I don’t even use the default site wide activity stream – I’m talking about directly in the groups.and they still use that instead. Too bad there’s not an option or plug in to stop the stream on groups.
If you want to divert your members from using the whats-new within the group – create a child theme for the file activity/post-form.php and then wrap the entire html code in this if statement: (this still allows the group admin/mod to post status updates within a group)
if ( !bp_is_group() || ( bp_is_group() && ( is_site_admin() || groups_is_user_admin( $bp->loggedin_user->id, $bp->groups->current_group->id ) || groups_is_user_mod( $bp->loggedin_user->id, $bp->groups->current_group->id ) ) ) ) {
}
Updates Vs Forums? it’s a tricky one, I too want to encourage discussions and tend to find that users will post an update when in reality it would have been far better made as a forum topic or would it? Users can comment on updates made and in a threaded manner so there is a logical grouping of responses.
This is a tricky area, I find users don’t really understand what an update is, they also fail to realise that when someone makes an update that they should respond to it as a ‘reply’ I have people posting an update referencing another update completely and immediately suffer a disconect between bits of content that should be locked together.
You can do as rich! has suggested effectively removing the posting form, but also you can do things like set the group home page to be the forum tab rather than the general ‘all which has happened in one big hit’ page, it can help in this way users are dropped into the forum section straight off
Forum as default tab in Groups:
http://is.gd/cl9Yd
At risk of confusing matters there is also this possible approach:
on the group directory page change the avatar and group name permalinks to point not to the /group-name/ i.e ‘Home’ screen but to the /group-name/forum/
<div class=”item-title”><a href=”<?php (!bp_group_is_forum_enabled() )? bp_group_permalink(): bp_group_forum_permalink() ?>”><?php bp_group_name() ?></a></div>
That does mean though that links to the group that might appear around the site i.e in the activity stream will not be affected and continue to point to the ‘home’ tab/screen, a good or bad thing depending on ones viewpoint?
