Very nice.
I also liked Eco Living.
And thanks for the technical features info.
But would you mind sharing some details about your hosting environment?
Such as:
Number of servers & size of.
Database – sharded / replicated?
Any particular issues you had scaling up to 64k members?
There are more ‘large’ BP sites out there now.
It be great to collect dev info about scaling up, maybe even create a page hosted here about it.
For example, we have 25k users.
It’s going well, but scaling is an ongoing process.
When we first moved to a load balancer, we couldn’t distribute the load until we figured out that BP makes a lot of calls to ajax files in the wp-admin dir.
We had to add varnish rules so that wp-admin calls went to the master, but public site ajax calls could go to any webhead.
Hi Shane – thanks for the feedback.
The site has now passed 75,000 members, but traffic has scaled back with the pausing of a business funding competition. There are some other new features coming online in the next few weeks though, so we’ll see how that affects server performance.
The site is being cloud hosted, in conjunction with Harriman House’s online presence – a publishing company and part owner of Enterprise Nation.
Unfortunately, I don’t have too many details on their hosting setup – with our efforts concentrated on front end strategic features of the site. I can report that initial hosting on a reasonably specced VPS box ran into some difficulties coping with the number of sign ups.
Best regards, Roger
Just curious, what percentage of those members would you consider spam accounts?
Edit: Presumably a ton since there are 75,000 members but only around 5k Facebook likes and under 10k Twitter followers. Or is your renamed login page and captcha helping immensely?
There are no spam members on there (or no more than a small handful). The site is monitored and administered on a daily basis.
Enterprise Nation is a very successful company supporting UK small businesses. The membership comprises regular members, and special campaign sign ups.
Spam sign ups are prevented through a number of techniques – including the alternative sign up page (it’s more than just a renaming of register), and the use of a membership plugin. Captcha is just an additional layer of protection in this case.
10K Twitter followers, and 5K Facebook likes is a pretty impressive conversion ratio!
Thanks for the reply. Would you be able to go into further detail about what you mean by alternative sign-up page?
It’s a custom sign up form on a bespoke page; it’s not based on the register.php file that you find in the bp-default theme.
In the backend, we also unhook / hook in a number of custom functions to process sign ups – including auto logins, assignment of user meta data, and sending custom welcome emails.
Is this the page you mean: http://www.enterprisenation.com/become-member/
Is something that can be easily implemented if outlined in a tutorial? Or made into a plugin? I’m sorry to hijack this thread btw, but since spam is obviously a major issue with Buddypress, if sites like the ones you create have found a way around it, you could be helping tons of people if you share, in detail, the way you did this. Or you could at least make a ton of money if you sold it in plugin form.
@rogercoathup
Great to read about your success with BuddyPress and Enterprise Nation.
Customizing registration appears to be a must when creating a high load community. There is a lot of heavy lifting that needs to be done during signup which requires a custom process.
Interesting that you do not use and activation email.
The site appears to be locked down from a BuddyPress standpoint. No Activity Stream?
@neononcon you might want to check out WangGuard (free in WordPress plugins) for help in limiting spam registration.
~eric
@elangley
@elangley – BuddyPress is used to provide the backbone for member accounts on Enterprise Nation. Customised activity stream loops are also used (e.g. clicking on discussions a sidebar option from some pages) takes you to a custom activity stream showing new forum threads, and blog comments & threads.
The profiles are currently being overhauled – with a raft of new functions coming on board in the next month or so (e.g. shop account integration, and some bespoke BuddyPress components for directory listings).
Hi @rogercoathup, I have noticed that if you click on some link /button on your site that between every page load there’s a 1 sec white page blink , I had the same problem on http://www.4ella.com and have removed it by disactivating some plugins (I don’t remember which ones 
), could you tell me how many plugins are you using ? Or are you trying to use more codes than plugins on your site because before I had about 70 plugins active , now I have only about 20 , the site is much more quicker now and I don’t see no white pages between page loads anymore , but there are many plugins which I miss a lot , so I am trying to find the way how to activate more plugins without slowing down the site and seeing white page between page loads.
