D Cartwright

This plugin provides neat chatrooms into BuddyPress groups. Each Group admin can enable a group Chat room, available for all group members to view and post.
The Chat area provides an ajax chat room which displays the most recent messages along with timestamps and usernames. It also has a “who’s online” area which shows other group members viewing the Chat page.
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Who’s Online list of members in the chatroom.</li>
<li>Text Chat: Supports text and links added via the text input box.</li>
<li>Video and other embeds – Videos such as You-tube can be added as an embedded video using the Video button. The same link can be used for other WordPress embedable urls.</li>
<li>Emojis supported: over 1,000 emojis easily inserted into the chat stream with options to load them all or just a subset.</li>
<li>Images: Users with upload_files capability can add images from the media directory/upload into the chat stream.</li>
<li>Images Lightbox: Supports WP Featherlight lightbox, if you install this plugin then images loaded into chat will open in a lightbox.</li>
<li>Activity threading: chat conversations can be collected and posted to the activity stream.</li>
<li>Moderation: Group admin and moderators can delete chat messages.</li>
<li>Theming: Chat message box colours can be set by Group Admin</li>
<li>Auto-hide of chat messages after up to 30 days.</li>
<li>Auto-deletion of chat messages after up to 30 days.</li>
</ul>
Chat messages support links, embeded video is supported an it’s possible to call in another site member to the chat using @mentions.
I’ve introduced rudimentary threads support. The behavior is that a new message, posted more then 15 minutes after the last message will be marked as a new thread. All messages posted after that initial message will be regarded as part of that thread. After 15 minutes the thread will be deemed closed and if posting of threads to group activity is enabled then all messages in the thread will be posted in a single activity update. I’m expecting this functionality to change as the plugin develops.
Currently the chat supports text chat and the sharing of links. I’m interested in adding further features but would like to see some user requests for the same.
This plugin was originally created by David Cartwright and has been forked by Venutius. It includes an emoji set which was sourced from WP Emoji One by Monchito.net.
This plugin runs from your own server, no chat data leaves your site. This has has the benefit of minimizing your exposure regarding user privacy and GDPR, however chat will be as responsive as your server and can be laggy because of this. User conversations are stored for one month then deleted.

BuddyPress Group Chatroom

This plugin provides neat chatrooms into BuddyPress groups. Each Group admin can enable a group Chat room, available for all group members to view and …

Robin W

An add-on to the bbPress forum plugin – creates private forum groups
This Plugin creates unlimited private forum groups.
Forums are then allocated to one or more groups, and users allocated to one or more groups.
What this achieves 
unlimited private groups 
Each user is set to a group or groups, and each forum can have any or all the groups associated with it 
Any number of public forums combined with any number of group forums. The group forums can be individually set to public or private. 
Forum title and description (but not topics or replies) can be set to be visible to non-group users, allowing people to see that a forum exists but not access it 
Separate pages can be set to allow redirection of non group users for sign-up or information 
Topic Permissions 
Topic Permissions is designed for sites where users need to have different permissions to different forums. 
For instance the ability for users to contribute to one forum whilst only being able to view another, or only start topics in one forum, or only reply to topics in another.
Example
So if 
User a belongs to group 1 
User b belongs to group 2 
User c belongs to group 3
and 
Forum x is set to allow group 2 
Forum y is set to allow group 2 and group 3 
Forum z is set to allow group 1 and group 3
Then 
User a can access only forum z 
User b can access forum x and forum y 
User c can access forum y and forum z
Restrictions/warnings
The widgets (bbpress) forums list, (bbpress) recent replies, and (bbpress) recent topics SHOULD NOT BE USED, as they will show topics headings and author names for all forums. Replacement widgets called (private groups) forums list, (private groups) recent replies, and (private groups) recent topics are available instead
Works with bbpress 2.5.3 or higher

Private groups

After wasting hours trying to get Skyverge's WooCommerce Memberships to do what I needed (no practical way to protect topics), I tried this and had it doing everything I needed in under 15 minutes.

Setup a group, manually assigned users to that group.
Set the forum to private and assigned that that group to it.
Viola, everything worked exactly as I wanted.

Public doesn't even see the forum exists. Group members can when logged in.  Non-members can't go directly to to topic URL and bypass the protection.

Only suggestions would be:
1. cleanup the settings pages and instructions, they're a bit overly complicated and hard to follow. 
2. some way to trigger group membership programmatically based on a WooCommerce purchase (I know, to specific and I'll probably code it myself for what I need).

Thanks again for an awesome bbp plugin!

Easy setup and protected forums exactly as I needed

For bbPress - Creates private forum groups

BuddyPress Group Chatroom vs Private groups