Bug when using ASP with BuddyBoss Group-associated Forums

[nickchomey18]

I sent a presales email with about 16 questions, but ended up just buying the plugin and 12 months of support anyway. I haven’t yet investigated the questions, so I would appreciate if you could answer them when you are able. The only one that I have an answer to is the first – whether it works with BuddyBoss, and it does.

However, I have noticed one big issue so far. When forum replies are included in the Index Table, the reply submission stalls but actually registers 3 of the same reply. If I create a reply in a standalone forum, this does not happen. If I disable ASO or remove replies from the index table, the problem goes away.

I have attached a screen recording of the problem.

So, there is clearly some incompatibility between ASP and forums that are associated with a group. I have included a URL that gives you admin access to my staging site without needing to login. I hope that you can help resolve this as I am primarily using ASP to add search and filtering capabilities to the forums.

On a related note, in the event that there are other incompatibilities (such as not respecting the privacy of private/hidden groups or returning activity posts from members who you are not connected with), I think that it would be very worthwhile if you could resolve them. BuddyBoss has its own pretty comprehensive search function, but it doesn’t handle attachment content and, more importantly, doesn’t really provide any filtering capabilities. In fact, there is basically zero search capabilities for the forum component – where it is most necessary. Once I get things working on my site, I intend to share the results with the BuddyBoss community and I am sure that many will want to buy ASP.

Thanks!

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi,

Thank you for the details!

I needet to debug this via the plugin editor, and I found the problem. When the index table was trying to apply the “the_title” filter on the reply titles, it bugged out for some reason. It may have been because the reply title is actually empty – however it should not cause any issues for WordPress. There might be a different hook also assigned to the “the_title” filter, and maybe that one was set off and causing a loop of some sort.
Anyways, I simply added a condition not to apply that filter when the title is empty, and it seems to have resolved the problem.
I will incorporate this in the upcoming release as well for sure.

[nickchomey18]

Thanks, that’s fantastic! Is there some code that I can add to a snippet to fix this on my site prior to your next release?

Also, I had recently noticed that the reply titles are empty and submitted a support ticket to BuddyBoss about it. It seems to me that there should definitely be a title – both for compatibility with plugins that would be expecting one, as well as for the fact that when you move a reply to a different topic, it actually creates a title! It is clearly an oversight by them.

I also messed around with a snippet to add a title to replies – I forget if I kept it or not, but I will investigate to see if that is causing a conflict with ASP.

[nickchomey18]

My previous snippet to add reply titles was using an action hook after the reply was created to run wp_update_post, so it was not interfering with ASP. But I just found a somewhat hidden filter that runs immediately prior to wp_insert_post and was able to modify it to create a post_title, which is far better as it also doesn’t create a revision post. The problem with ASP has now gone away – so this killed two birds with one stone! Thanks very much for the prompt to look into this some more!

I suppose you can close the ticket now.

[Ernest Marcinko]

Oh that is great 🙂
Nevertheless, I will keep this modification for the upcoming release, as it is a minor performance upgrate to not execute some code on the empty title, as it is redundant. It was the file wp-content/plugins/ajax-search-pro/includes/classes/etc/indextable.class.php in case you need the modification.

I will close this ticket then.

[Author]

Posts