We are living in a facebook world… and one of the first questions I get on my bp install is, “How do I post a status update to friends only?”
I did some due diligence searching and came up with no discussions on how to limit the scope of who gets to read your status updates.
The quick hack is to call bp_is_friend() before displaying status updates in the activity stream. This is unfortunately the “Nuclear Option” which has negative effects: (1) it causes “activity stream atrophy” (if your 20-item stream has 8 non-friend updates, you’ll only see 12 items total) and (2) there is no longer an option to post a sitewide activity update.
This seems like an important feature that would be very popular, given the fact that facebook has conditioned people to expect it… so I was surprised to see so little discussion of this (none really).
Any ideas on how a function/plugin might be structured to allow users the choice of posting activity updates sitewide or to Friends Only? Anybody have a working solution??