suggestion: skip BB-Press-Forum completely from BuddyPress

[erich73]

Currently, the "Group Activity Posts" and "Group Forum-Posts" are very similar and very hard to understand what the difference of those is ? It seems those 2 features are quite similar in the end ?

So when I decide to write a new post:

• should I post it within the "Groups / Home" or
• should I post it within "Groups / Forum" ?

---

SOLUTION:

I would suggest to delete and skip the BB-Press-Forum from BuddyPress.

For the page "​http://testbp.org/forums", do the following:

• instead of having "Popular Group Forums", change it into "Popular Groups".

• instead of having "Latest Forum Topics", change it into "Latest Activity Topics" which would give an overview of the main topics.

So this would be very similar as we have now, but instead of Forum-Topics showing "Activity-Topics".

[r-a-y]

There is no such thing as "Activity Topics" because there are no activity titles!
But I get what you are saying.

The creation of activity comments have made the forums component somewhat less relevant now.

In practice though, Forums are for focused discussion. Forum posts are not threaded and you must visit the actual forum post to reply.

Activity updates are freeform and have no real structure, but are threaded and can be replied to without having to visit the actual activity permalink.

---

Erich, I think your suggestion of deleting the Forums component is a little drastic. The admin does have the option to install it! But I do understand the concern.

This is somewhat related to a ticket I opened about the usability factor of having too many ways to communicate:
​http://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1419

[apeatling]

You must remember that people will use BuddyPress in different ways. The default theme just shows one way to use the product. In some instances it might make sense to turn off activity comments and make the forums more prominent. That's the beauty, you can pick and choose which features fit your needs. It's not all or nothing.