Commenting on activity for topics and replies cannot be enabled

[jdgrimes]

I have just reproduced this on a fresh install of the latest versions of bbPress, BuddyPress, and WordPress.

BuddyPress activity items created for a forum topics and replies do not have commenting enabled by default. However, there is a setting offered by BuddyPress, "Allow activity stream commenting on blog and forum posts." But even when this checkbox is checked, comments are not enabled on activity items for forum posts.

Tracing this down revealed that BuddyPress handles things properly, and it is actually the \BBP_BuddyPress_Activity::activity_can_comment() function, which is hooked to the 'bp_activity_can_comment' filter, that is causing the issue. The code that is the problem is this:

<?php

                if ( ( false === $activities_template->disable_blogforum_replies ) || (int) $activities_template->disable_blogforum_replies ) {

Because the value is always a boolean, this always fails. The value is saved as 1 or 0, but it cast to a bool in \BP_Activity_Template::__construct():

<?php

                $this->disable_blogforum_replies = (bool) bp_core_get_root_option( 'bp-disable-blogforum-comments' );

A client just noticed this on their site, as it apparently worked before. Neither bbPress nor BuddyPress appear to have made changes to this recently though, so I'm not sure what broke this. Perhaps it is related to some change in WordPress?

The workaround was to unhook that bbPress method for now, and all works as expected.

[espellcaste]

This seems a bug or a problem on BuddyPress and not bbPress. I'd recommend opening a ticket: ​https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/newticket

[johnjamesjacoby]

In 6810:

BuddyPress: prefer empty() check on disable_blogforum_replies setting.

This fixes a bug causing some activity to not appear in relative activity streams.

Fixes #3180.