Free version not worth the effort

  • I spent about two weeks configuring my site with the assumption I would use this plugin for my forum. I had tried bbPress, but found that it had formatting issues on the twentyfifteen theme, wheras formatting was almost okay with WPS.

    After fiddling with the css for quite a while, I got the WPS plugin looking reasonable, but it was mssing some basic functionality like a menu for adding html tags when posting. I found that the plugin ignored the moderations settings at my admin page. A bit of research, which included downloading their instruction pdf, I added ‘moderation = “1”‘ to my shortcode, and got moderation for replies, but not for new user-initiated threads. A bit more research suggested that extra plugins were needed to stop users intitiating their own unmoderated threads.

    Right through the plugin there appears to be confusion about what constitutes a post versus a reply, and user-initiated threads are missed by the default WordPress ‘Recent Posts’ and the ‘Recent Comments’ widgets.

    I never managed to solve the styling problems on mobile browsers, with huge indents for sub-comments taking up a large part of the available screen space, and I couldn’t work out how to turn off sub-comments. I had indicated didn’t want nested threads on my admin page but this was ignored.

    Some of these issues might have been solved with more effort, but the lack of appropriate moderation was the last straw. I reverted to bbPress and solved the formatting issues with a little bit of css in my child theme. Wish I’d done that at the start.

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  • Hi kanjipad, thanks for your comments.

    I will ensure that your issues are reviewed, indenting on mobiles, for example should not be shown and I will have a look and check this out.

    Moderation is an important issue. Did you contact us via the forums or helpdesk? If you did, I’ll review the conversation, but even if not, will do some testing on this to confirm things are okay with it and working as they should. If any fixes are required, needless to say, this will be made and released ASAP.

    Smaller issue, but you can remove sub-comments through a shortcode option.

    Good luck with your site kanjipad, best wishes, Simon.

    Thread Starter Leto

    (@kanjipad)

    A very gracious reply. Best of luck with developing it further. I suggest looking over someone’s shoulder while they try to get it going on the default twentyfifteen theme and see how long it takes them to get it looking decent on both PCs and mobiles.

    To be fair, thinking back, it’s possible the moderation was affected by the fact that my dummy users had previously submitted posts. The appearance on mobiles was the main barrier for me.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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