Adding a bbPress Forum

[sydneymovingguide]

I'm going to add a bbPress forum to my Magazine theme but have heard that spam is a problem with bbPress. Am interested in hearing about others experience with bbPress and Genesis.

What anti-spam plugin did you use the worked well?

What other bbPress plugins do you recommend to use with bbPress and Genesis?

What bbPress plugins do you NOT recommend?

Thanks in advance.

http://sydneymovingguide.com

[TravisPri]

Hi there,

I used bbPress on this site: harvestfuel.org/forum. It's been working nicely for their purposes.

First off, you will need bbPress Genesis Extend. It solves some issues that allow the two systems to work well with one another.

To combat spam, we implemented a moderation system with bbPress Moderation plugin. This adds the ability to require moderator approval before posts are visible. The only drawback about this plugin is the process of approving topics & replies is not exactly streamlined so it adds a bit more work for the client/administrator. It's worth it, however, if you want to keep the forum completely spam-free.

With the installation of bbPress, we also saw a sudden influx in spam user registration. We combatted this with Wanguard which is free up to a certain number of visitors and has completely eliminated our spam user problem.

A few other plugins we used:

• bbPress Shortcode Whitelist
  Allows you to specify certain shortcodes that can be used within bbPress topics and replies. We used this to allow images with captions to display properly. (Video too maybe? I can't remember entirely. It's been awhile.)
• bbPress String Swap
  Allows you to customize the wording of a lot of the built-in bbPress titles, like the name of the forum archive, user role display names, etc.
• Peter's Login Redirect and Peter's Login Redirect on First Login (user meta based)

These aren't specifically bbPress related, but they are useful for specifying where users will go when they login. You may set up on your forum on a page that isn't the actual "forum archive" that comes with bbPress (this is what we did on Harvest Fuel) and so we needed a way to redirect users to the correct forum page on login. Secondly, the redirect on first login is useful so that you can welcome new forum members, direct them to an FAQ page, etc.

Hope this helped! Let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them 🙂

[TravisPri]

Hi there,

I used bbPress on this site: harvestfuel.org/forum. It's been working nicely for their purposes.

First off, you will need bbPress Genesis Extend. It solves some issues that allow the two systems to work well with one another.

To combat spam, we implemented a moderation system with bbPress Moderation plugin. This adds the ability to require moderator approval before posts are visible. The only drawback about this plugin is the process of approving topics & replies is not exactly streamlined so it adds a bit more work for the client/administrator. It's worth it, however, if you want to keep the forum completely spam-free.

With the installation of bbPress, we also saw a sudden influx in spam user registration. We combatted this with Wanguard which is free up to a certain number of visitors and has completely eliminated our spam user problem.

A few other plugins we used:

• bbPress Shortcode Whitelist
  Allows you to specify certain shortcodes that can be used within bbPress topics and replies. We used this to allow images with captions to display properly. (Video too maybe? I can't remember entirely. It's been awhile.)
• bbPress String Swap
  Allows you to customize the wording of a lot of the built-in bbPress titles, like the name of the forum archive, user role display names, etc.
• Peter's Login Redirect and Peter's Login Redirect on First Login (user meta based)

These aren't specifically bbPress related, but they are useful for specifying where users will go when they login. You may set up on your forum on a page that isn't the actual "forum archive" that comes with bbPress (this is what we did on Harvest Fuel) and so we needed a way to redirect users to the correct forum page on login. Secondly, the redirect on first login is useful so that you can welcome new forum members, direct them to an FAQ page, etc.

Hope this helped! Let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them 🙂

[sydneymovingguide]

Thank you SOOOO MUCH!! For your thorough answer.

I still haven't set up my forum yet. It's this weekend main project.

Once I get started I'm sure will have more questions.

Thanks again.

PS I really like your forum and website. Fantastic idea.

[iamkingsleyf]

Thanks for this

[Author]

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