BuddyPress.org

I have a small site where members are categorized. For example, hypothetically, if these were my categories

Knights
Dukes
Counts
Pawns

I don’t want users to be able to join or leave a category. Instead I want to be assign them to whatever category. New users start out as pawns. At some point they satisfy a certain criteria and they can move up (either by an admin or invitation, etc).

Users need to be able to see who has risen to other categories. The idea is that you want to join those users in that group, and users who have gotten there should feel good about it and want others to know.

I’ve been trying to use Groups to do this for me, but there are some serious problems. If I make groups private, I can control membership ok, but then a Pawn can’t see who’s a knight, they can only see that there is a Knights group.

If groups are public it that would satisfy the visibility requirement, but leaves 2 pretty big membership problems: I have to remove user’s ability to joining and leaving a groups.

Because I can prevent users from creating groups via the Dashboard, at least this problem is solved. Which leads to my questions.

Questions:
1. Is groups the right way to do this?
2. Can I remove the user ability to join and leave groups? Perhaps by hiding the join and leave buttons?

Possible Solutions:
1. As a “sort of” solution, I’m currently using BuddyDev’s Limit Group Membership plugin: (http://buddydev.com/plugins/buddypress-limit-group-membership-per-user/) which lets me set the number of groups a user can join to 0. However anyone can still leave a group whenever they want, and also it acts a little weird for administrators.
2. I think what I really need to do is just remove the join/leave buttons from the member directories and groups directory. I’m sure you can do this in php – but I have no earthly clue how. A plugin that can do this would be “perfect” – can’t find one.
3. Another (possibly quite simple) solution would be if I could create a private group member directory that is visible to the public – then group membership could be controlled normally by invitation only.

Any help is much appreciated!