When you create a new forum you need to associate the user groups who can access it – with the permission set they will be using controlling what they do. At that screen you should be able to set this auto-subscribe option for that user group to that particular forum.

Not sure about existing forums and need to check with Mr Papa on that question… Steve?

As the plugin description says:

A Simple:Press plugin for auto subscribing (requires Subcriptions plugin) usergroup membership to a forum when adding a permission for the userggroup on a forum.

And from the admin help text:

If you select this option when adding a new permission (combination of user group and permission set) to a forum, you will auto subscribe all members of the user group to the forum where the permission is being added.  The users in the user group will have to have permisison to subscribe.  And users will still have the option of choosing to remove the subscription in their profile.

It does not have any effect on current membership of forums… but of course, you could remove existing membership and then re-add it back in to get the plugin to do its thing…

I have this working for us perfectly.  For ex – we create a separate user group for each group of folks we want to have access to each forum. 

1. Create forum

2. Create user group (name it so you know what it’s for for better maintenance)

3. Add members to new user group

4. Create new permission set

5. Add new permission to the forum

5. Select the ‘auto-subscribe all members’ to the forum

Since it sounds as though you already have the forums set up, you may want to back up, then remove the existing permissions so that the new one added gives you the option to auto-subscribe, or make sure that the new permission has a different name than the existing.

This plug-in has saved me tons of time!!!  Thanks, Brandon! 

exactly…

I did all the steps above, but I still didn’t see the “Select the ‘auto-subscribe all members’ to the forum”. Am I missing something or is this feature removed?

Still valid and available…  you need the subscription plugin and membership subscribe plugin…

I installed and activated both plugins. They seem to work but there is one thing that is very confusing: When assigning a new user group and permissions to a forum, the text “Auto subscribe selected user group to this forum when adding permission” shows up, but there is NO radio button or check box! So there’s really no way I could possibly guess if this is actually turned on or of… 

See screen shot!

How do I fix this?

Curious. Do other SP admin panels show the checkboxes?

and… what version of SP is this please? If the very latest then I suspect there is going to be a simple CSS conflict with another plugin but will only know that if I can actually visit the site admin. Unless you know how to use the web console and can take a look yourself.

Hello!

All the other S:P admin pages show all controls and boxes and buttons correctly (see enclosed pic). I have this problem on two independent sites:

http://mixedtinkerings.com/forum
http://geographiedidaktik.org/de/forum/

They both run WordPress 4.1.1 and Simple:Press 5.5.4. For the mixedTinkerings I could give you admin access.

Oh dear! Don’t need to maker a visit. It is a very simple and very stupid little bug!

When we hanged the checkboxes in version 5.5.4 we had to make sure each one was in a specific format. We changed so many! But it looks like this one slipped through the net.

Do you feel able to make a small and simple code edit? Actually just re-arranging two lines of code?

Yes.

OK . the file you need to edit is admin/panel-forums./forms/spa-forums-group-permission-form.php

Right – more or less in the middle – of that file are these two lines of code:

<label for="sfadddef"><?php spa_etext('Add to group default permissions'); ?></label>
<input type="checkbox" id="sfadddef" name="adddef" />

All you need to do is reverse them so the ‘input’ line comes first

Our apologies for the problem and for the fact that this one slipped through the net.

Ok, I can do that for one of my sites. For the other one I don’t have access to the file structure via ftp. Is there a way to do this by only using WordPress interface screens in a web browser?

No way that I am aware of. The WP plugin editor can only travel 2 deep into folder levels from the root.