sounds like the permissions might not be set up correctly… map users would be the wrong place.. you would need to look into each forum on forum – forums – manage forums and make sure you have assigned the proper permission set and usergroup to each forum…

please see:  http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/getting-started/controlling-access/

for more info on controlling accesses…

I should probably explain further, as the codex hasn’t helped – i’ve spent several hours reading it.

These contributors have been migrated from PHPbb (using the conversion tool) and then merged with their WP counterparts when SP was installed and setup. They are listed in the standard Members group, along with all other users.

Other members have the ability to reply, so why don’t those that are contributors/authors/editors? As stated I have checked the map users screen.

I *may* (awaiting feedback from those concerned) have sussed this. When I created the contributors own group (as a way of fixing the problem which already existed) I hadn’t realised that after adding them to it they were still in the standard Members group. I’ve since made them members of just the second group and certainly in the case of one account the problem has resolved.

However, the original problem still exists without this modification – why did it happen in the first place? No changes were made to the default permissions and group memberships. Is it a result of something at the WP end, or an artifact of migrating data from phpbb?

sorry, still not sure ‘what happened’…  the wp role is not used by simple press for anything – except perhaps for gaining membership in an sp usergroup if you configured user mapping… but a wp role itself, including admin, gets you nothing by default on the forum…

and when you map users to a specific usergroup, that will only affect new users… there is a button where you can force it to map all users at that time, but its an extra step to set up…

and members are allowed to belong to multiple usersgroups… quite standard and normal since you may have different forums wanting different accesses… so unless you set the single membership option to true, adding members to a usergroup leaves any existing ones intact…  and if user has two memberships on a forum, the best one wins.  that is, if any membership grants a permission, they will get it regardless if one does not grant it…

As I say, I haven’t changed any settings in the permissions and only added a second group to attempt to fix the issue. It seems that it is more widespread than just contributors, however. The ability to reply has been active in all groups.

I wonder if there is a db field I can check?

Try going to the forum admin > Toolbox > Housekeeping and click the ‘Reset Auths Cache’ button. This will re-build permissions at user level. See if that helps any.

Yellow Swordfish said
Try going to the forum admin > Toolbox > Housekeeping and click the ‘Reset Auths Cache’ button. This will re-build permissions at user level. See if that helps any.

It certainly helped a lot, actually, indirectly helping me to find the problem was with incorrect attribution of permissions on each board. I found this puzzling as all users had access to all boards when I first set it up, but at least I know now thanks everyone for your help.

Excellent. That should remain good now.