Aim

The first objective was to install two sets of forums (in French and in English, as for the news blogs) in their respective URLs.

• English forums
• French forums

The locations have an influence on the rest since I still wanted to have a good integration with the wordpress blogs. You are expected to install the forums inside the blog.

So, here is how I did it.

Configuration

The main issue is to install the software on the web site in the right location. The package is prepared to be downloaded into a bbpress sub-directory inside the wordpress directory, so I had to change the directory name just after decompression (And I did it twice: Once for each language).

The config.php file is set according to the following:

domain = 'http://www.roumazeilles.net'; // Example: 'http://bbpress.example.com'
	// There should be both a leading and trailing slash here. '/' is fine if the site is in root.
	$bb->path   = '/news/en/wordpress/forum/';				   // Example: '/forums/'

// What are you going to call me?
$bb->name   = 'Roumazeilles.net - English forums';

// This must be set before running the install script.
$bb->admin_email = 'wp_en_@roumazeilles.net';

// Set to true if you want pretty permalinks.
$bb->mod_rewrite = true;

// The number of topics that show on each page.
$bb->page_topics = 30;

// A user can edit a post for this many minutes after submitting.
$bb->edit_lock = 60;

// Your timezone offset.  Example: -7 for Pacific Daylight Time.
$bb->gmt_offset = 0;

// Change this to localize bbPress.  A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to bb-includes/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to bb-includes/languages and set BBLANG to 'de'
// to enable German language support.
define('BBLANG', '');

// Your Akismet Key.  You do not need a key to run bbPress, but if you want to take advantage
// of Akismet's powerful spam blocking, you'll need one.  You can get an Akismet key at
// http://wordpress.com/api-keys/
$bb->akismet_key = '1234567890'; // Example: '1234567890'


// The rest is only useful if you are integrating bbPress with WordPress.
// If you're not, just leave the rest as it is.

$bb->wp_table_prefix = 'en_';  // WordPress table prefix.  Example: 'wp_';
$bb->wp_home = 'https://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wordpress';  // WordPress - Options->General: Blog address (URL) // No trailing slash.  Example: 'http://example.com'
$bb->wp_siteurl = 'https://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wordpress';  // WordPress - Options->General: WordPress address (URL) // No trailing slash. Example: 'http://example.com'

/* Stop editing */

if ( !defined('BBPATH') )
	define('BBPATH', dirname(__FILE__) . '/' );
require_once( BBPATH . 'bb-settings.php' );

?>

In order to get a more direct access to the forums I also corrected slightly the web site .htaccess file to add the following redirecting lines that lead to more user-friendly addresses used here.

redirect 301 /forum/en https://www.roumazeilles.net/news/en/wordpress/forum/
redirect 301 /forum/fr https://www.roumazeilles.net/news/fr/wordpress/forum/

Additional steps

Directory access rights

I also directly had to modify the directory access rights on the web server.

chmod 644 ./forum/ (this may not be critical)
mkdir ./forum/bb-cache/
chmod 644 ./forum/bb-cache/ (this is needed to update the site-management options)

Theme

bbPress is using themes very similar to WordPress. This is helpful to reduce the amount of work involved in preparing the forums for a nicer presentation when you already have a WordPress theme.

However, it is clearly painful to create the many files expected by bbPress (I hope that this will be simplified in the future). Anyway, thanks to DreamWeaver 3.x and its very good support of HTML templates, thanks to the organization of my pages with a significant part located in the CSS file, it has been relatively easy to do this task. But it still is too much pain for a good software package. At least, if you don’t do anything, the Kakumei theme is used by default ensuring that your forums are displayed conveniently.

Internationalization

Now, since my web site is set both in English and in French, there is no reason for the forums to be set differently. The installation in English is standard, but the French bit is a little different. You need to update a separate file (named bbpress.pot) that will provide all of the needed text transalations.

I installed one in the language directory. That’s all. It’s unofficial translation, but that’s good for me.

Last comments

In the end, after a rather long testing phase on a hidden web site, I have been able to set the forums up rather easily (it could be better, but bbPress is still in development stages, so the issues were understandable -and they were not overwhelming). The documentation is very terse, but the community is active and supportive.

One thing I had difficulties with is that bbPress does a heavy use of page caching. When changing something in the configuration, you have to remember to reload from the site (not from the cache) or you get the feeling that nothing is ever happenning whatever your moves. Annoying if understandable for performance reasons.

On another issue, the SPAM problem on the Internet became a major problem: Prorams try to make believe that they are human beings in order to insert advertisment anywhere a user can write (in the messages of a forum, in the comments of a blog, etc). For some time now, it became common that human users must identify themselves by their capacity to recognize a badly written word. Theoretically, this is a very efficient Turing test allowing to differentiate a human from a machine only by the results of their actions. Practically, the abilities of software programs have become so impressive that SPAM is slowly coming back again through those filters named CAPTCHAs (those images that you must read and copy back in order to be identified and approved for a specific action).

The problem appears to be: create CAPTCHA tremendously difficult for the automated software and, simultaneously, bring human beings to the task of checking scans of documents difficult to read by program.

The solution: reCAPTCHA.

The idea is to provide a CAPTCHA service to thousands of bloggers and forum administrators (WordPress, phpBB, etc.) Users are invited to recognize two words specifically difficult to read (profesional OCR programs failed during scans done by Carnegie Mellon University). The user must recognize them both. One is used to check that this is a human being, the other will fill a database of OCR translations that will be used to deliver even more CAPTCHAs and to improve the quality of a document scanned by Carnegie Mellon. Dual core technology: efficiently fight spammers and deliver millions of human users to improve the scan quality of thousands of ancient documents (without using slave labor).

Example of a difficult to read/scan document:

One of the key advantages is that most pro OCR programs can tell when they fail to recognize a character or a word (when they are not confident enough).

Caution: Not safe for work.

Requirements

For this,I started to check what solutions are available for a WordPress web site adminsitrator in order to stay well integrated into the original web log, with an interface as simple as possible, but providing a very good protection against SPAM (even if you nearly never see them, SPAM messages are still a pain in the neck requiring permanent attention and tools to protect the web site against the flood).

Comparison

The table below give a general idea of the characteristics that I tried to check in the various products I found good enough to be detailed.

Others

Conclusion

For the time being, I would favor bbPress because it is supported by a very active community and because -even if edges are still rough- rapid progress can be observed going in the right direction.

See also

List of plugins for WordPress forums.