Hi Bob,
Sorry for the late reply. I had to create a new account as my original one was flagged as a brand account and can no longer post.
Both issues trace back to a single thing: the New Reply notification is using the [reply-url] tag, which outputs the standalone reply permalink (/reply/4325). That’s a bbPress “single reply” URL, and bbPress internally redirects it to the topic before displaying it — on a private/hidden forum that extra redirect is exactly what bounces a logged-out visitor onto the default wp-login.php instead of your custom login page. Your topic link doesn’t have this problem because it’s already a topic URL.
The fix is to switch that tag to [reply-replyurl]:
Go to bbPress Notify → Settings → New Reply Email Body and replace [reply-url] with [reply-replyurl]. Because the result is a topic URL (like your working topic link), it routes through your custom login page and it lands on the topic at the exact reply — which also answers your second question about not linking to the bare reply number.
If you’d like to force every bbPress Notify login link to your custom page regardless of target, add this snippet (site-specific plugin or theme functions.php):
add_filter( 'bbpnns-login-url', function( $login_url, $get ) {
$redirect = ! empty( $get['redirect_to'] ) ? $get['redirect_to'] : home_url( '/' );
return add_query_arg( 'redirect_to', rawurlencode( $redirect ), 'https://www.xxx.com/your-login-page/' );
}, 10, 2 );
(Swap in your real login-page URL. This overrides the wp_login_url() fallback the links use by default.)
On the documentation page — you’re right, it’s out of date. For the New Reply email, the tags the current version actually supports are:
[reply-title], [reply-content], [reply-excerpt], [reply-url], [reply-replyurl], [reply-author], [reply-author-email], [reply-forum], [reply-forum-url], [topic-url], [topic-title], [topic-author], [topic-author-email], [topic-content], [topic-excerpt], [date], plus the [recipient-*] and [blogname] tags.
I’ll get the docs updated — thanks for flagging it. Let me know if the [reply-replyurl] swap sorts it out.
Cheers,
Vinny
