I think the best thing here is to take this in two steps. Let’s deal with the technical issues first and then come back to the data issues.

So – the difference between the two sites is that the ‘bad’ one has the main jQuery library being loaded by your WP theme. It is an old version. It is NOT WP compliant. It is just plain wrong. And is causing scripting errors to be thrown which is stopping other scripts from operating.

This codex article explains what this means and why it needs to be fixed:

http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/faq/troubleshooting/what-is-this-jquery-conflict/

And most usually – it is an easy thing to fix once you discover where it is being loaded in the first place.

OK, so I upgraded my Jquery to 1.7.1 from 1.4.2 and that seems to have fixed #1.

I can now modify threads and move things around, which is good!

How about the other issues now?

#2 what permissions have  you given guests?  the option you referred has nothing to do with guests and their permissions… see:   http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/getting-started/controlling-access/

you are still loading an exeternal jquery and not the version that comes with wp:

<script type=’text/javascript’ src=’//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js’></script>

btw, wp is on jquery 1.10.2…

OK, now that you pointed me to it, I found that Guests had “Limited Permissions” and I really wanted them to have ReadOnly permissions which prevents them from posting at all.  I had that set on the forum but forgot to do it on the new one.  #2 is cleared up now.

Issue #1 was cleared up when I upgraded, but using jQuery 1.7 shouldn’t be a huge problem here.  I have upgraded (again) to 1.10.2.  The source in this case should also not be a problem for the forum plugin.  I am not seeing a change in behavior for anything else after this upgrade, so I think we can safely rule this out for issue 3.

What can I do about the user issue now?

Just for the record there is a lot of difference between jQuery 1.7 and 1.10 – in particular the jQuery UI library – which we make a lot of use of – needs the latest version. WordPress team made quite a lot of changes specifically to support 1.10. The basic answer is that this is one of the primary reasons they supply a copy that plugins and themes are supposed to use. That and the ‘no conflict’ addition.

OK – so by user issue I assume we are now moving on to this:

3)  The user migration from phpBB with your migration tool sort-of worked, but I ended up not bringing across 19K user accounts (80% of which were spam).  Now, as users register on the forum, there’s getting associated to “old” forum accounts and the display name doesn’t match their WP user profile.  I’d like to reset this so the forum is using ONLY the WP profile info right now (and getting rid of the 19K users that already exist in the forum, sync’ing my SP forum with WP userbase effectively), but I don’t know how.  Is this possible?

I am afraid that you lost me on the part that starts ‘I’d like to reset…’… I don’t get what you are really asking for there.

But lets talk about why this is happening. The best action, of course, would have been to re-import to pick up the rest of the users. Failing that there is clearly an user_id deficit.

The first thing to understand is that there are not WordPress users and Simple:Press users. There are just users. WordPress identifies these in the ‘users’ table with the user ID. So does Simple:Press. So clearly what seems to have happened due to an incomplete user import is that the user IDs in the forum records are higher than the last user ID in the users table resulting in a new user getting given an ID that the forum data believes is already assigned.

I would have thought the best way to deal with that would be to reset the auto-increment counter of the users table to a higher value than the highest of the old, unimported users. That would need to be done directly on the database table and I do not actually know how that is done although I am sure it can be.

Or – perhaps you can explain in a little more detail what you really wanted to happen please…

Well, if that were really true (there are only WP users) then I wouldn’t be seeing the following:

– User “Bob” (new to my site) logs in and creates his account

– He also checks the forum.  The forum says he’s “Googlebot [Crawler]”. 

– His profile doesn’t say this.  He doesn’t seem to be able to change it, either

That strongly points to some metadata carried around by SimplePress from the import, yes?  Because if it was just WP user data, then I’d be fine since I had no users come over save myself and a default admin account for my web host.

Here’s what I want to accomplish:

• I need to somehow reset the above referenced metadata in my SP forum tables.  I need it to reflect the user profile data in the WP users tables now.
• I want to sync that data up with what’s already in my WP users tables
• I want to clear any data for users that don’t currently exist in SP user metadata tables to avoid this issue for the future
• I can’t reimport the data.  The old site is gone (web hosting company trashed it) so that is simply not an option here.

Well I suppose the first thing I have to say is that I am not, actually, a liar. There are ONLY WP USERS.

What we DO keep is a members row for each user which contains specific forum data over and above the wordpress core user data and this includes the display name the user would like to use for the forum display. You will not be able to edit that data in wordpress because, as I have said before, Simple:Press is a wordpress plugin. That means it sits on top of wordpress. It means Simple:Press knows all about WordPress but the opposite is not the case.

The members row is keyed upon the same User ID that WP created when the user signed up. clearly – as I have said – you have some very screwed up user data from your import.

Perhaps your best bet would be to clear out the WordPress users and usermeta tables apart from the admins etc., and do the same with the SP sfmembers table. Throw all the current, contaminated user data away and start again.

I don’t really know of any other way you could deal with it short of going through all the tables manually.

Well I suppose the first thing I have to say is that I am not, actually, a liar. There are ONLY WP USERS.

I’m certainly not accusing you of that, and I hope you don’t think that was the case!  I believe your next statement below completely lines up with my assertion:  there is some metadata you keep in addition to the users stored by WordPress:

What we DO keep is a members row for each user which contains specific forum data over and above the wordpress core user data and this includes the display name the user would like to use for the forum display. You will not be able to edit that data in wordpress because, as I have said before, Simple:Press is a wordpress plugin. That means it sits on top of wordpress. It means Simple:Press knows all about WordPress but the opposite is not the case.

This is exactly what I was saying.  So, given this is the case–and I can’t throw my current WP users away (again) since they’d be pretty mad about that, can I just reset the SP metadata only?  And possibly rebuild that SP-only metadata (at least in a default form) for the existing blog users I have now?

That’s the core of what I’ve been asking for, and if you can help me with that, then I think I can handle it from there.  Is there some scripting in the plugin you can point me to where this data is created/initialized?  What tables would I have to rebuild/clear out?

Not sure what you are asking..  is the forum content unimportant?  if you uninstalled simple press and then reinstalled it, it would realign all the users…  but you would lose you forum content doing that so think hard about that…

if you deleted just the meta data in sfmembers, you would potentially lose reference into the posts and topics and counts…  and when a user visit the forum the next, their sfmembers records info would get created…

but there is no rebuild meta data functionality…

before doing any of this, make sure to get a good database backup…