FIXED
Turns out that the prepopulated value corresponds to a user which has a user_id value of ‘0’ in the wp_bp_xprofile_data DB table, so I presume the Full Name field is grabbing this value, as there’s no other default value provided.
This user has since been deleted, so I have deleted this record from the wp_bp_xprofile_data table. I also found that I could correct the issue by renumbering the user_id value, however, I do not know what the long term impact of doing this would be.
I’m pretty sure this came up recently, and the core team had been unable to replicate — @djpaul was this something you were looking at?
We’ve never been able to figure it out, partly due to the lack of information we could gather from bug reports like this. Discovering there’s a user_id=0 is new info and is very helpful.
Can you remember if there was any special details about the user who owned this piece of profile data? Did you delete the user? Was it marked as spam before deleting? Any more details appreciated 
I created this user for myself for testing in the early stages of site development, before we imported content from Ning (thought I’d add that in case it’s relevant). This problem started around the time I deleted this user – perhaps there’s some disconnect between this table, and others on deletion where certain conditions exist, I don’t know? I’m afraid I don’t have exact replication steps though.
Happy to help if you have any further questions though? As I say, workaround seems to be just straight deleting the record in the table, but I suppose that’s only good if the user account has, or can be, deleted.
@aces Yes, but it wasn’t obvious to me that setting the user_id to -1 would stop it matching against profle field data with user_id = 0, as I didn’t expect that situation to ever occur!
Two problems here. One, this zero matching. The second is how zero user ID profle data gets put into the database. We/I can definitely look to fix the first for BuddyPress 1.6 — I’ll look into it when I finish work
@pescholar thanks for all the information! Hopefully we can figure out a permanent fix for this.
And if someone could be extra kind and create a trac ticket for this over at https://BuddyPress.trac.WordPress.org — be sure to link back to this discussion — I’ll be your BFF.
@pescholar What were/are you using to register users? Any third party authentication plugins (i.e. Facebook), or just everything built in?
@djpaul – Just the standard, out-of-the-box BuddyPress registration process for now. Couple of additional fields, all added as standard (via BP profile settings).
We are looking into using Gravity Forms for user registration in the future, mainly so that we can hook Twitter (& other social url’s) into extended & custom profile field, and also to make the registration process self-contained (not requiring email activation), but right now, we’re just using out-of-the-box functionality/forms.
FYI – We’re also using the Mingle theme by Parallelus but having raised this issue over on their support forums, I was informed that it’s highly unlikely to be a theme-related issue, which is fair enough really.
I’m sorry, but can you please tell us how you fixed it, but in an easier method? I didn’t quite understand what you wrote there. I have the same problem too.
@edinchez We’ve fixed this for BP 1.6 which should be out in a couple of weeks.
If you cannot wait, open up register.php in your theme and adjust this line:
`if ( bp_has_profile( ‘profile_group_id=1’ ) ) :`
to look like:
`if ( bp_has_profile( ‘user_id=-1&profile_group_id=1’ ) ) :`
Please please be sure to revert this change after you upgrade to 1.6; it’s the sort of seemingly-harmless change that could cause some subtly weird behaviour at some point in the future which would take ages to track down
@djpaul I’m using a custom theme and the contents of my registration/register.php file are these:
http://pastebin.com/Rm9uE9Us
I’m using pastebin because it wouldn’t allow me to paste the code, it kept giving me an error saying “Looks like you’ve already said that”. Any ideas?
Bump. Anyone? Or maybe @djpaul?
It seems that your theme has changed things around from ‘normal’. What theme are you using?
One would expect the file ( and line number in bp-default ) to be like: https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/1.5.6/bp-themes/bp-default/registration/register.php#L68
If you have a utility that will search with ‘Find in Files’ such as is available in notepad++ then you might be able to find where it’s been moved to….
@aces thank you so much, I had no idea Notepad++ had that feature. That fix only fixed the name field being filled though. I have Date of Birth and Country fields as well, any ideas on how to fix them? The DoB field is a date selection field, and the Country field is a drop-down list.
