I run a niche site. All my members are there because they share a common interest. I like the social network aspect of buddypress but could there be a way to just do away with the “friends” feature. The thing is my community is for animators. So upon joining up they should already be friends with everyone in the site and not pick and choose. If a group/forum is created, everyone on the site should have access to it and not have to join the group first.

I hope this makes sense. Basically, I run a community of animators (http://flashfilmmaker.com) I just want to maintain it as a community with the added social interactions buddypress can add, but remaion a niche community not a full blow social network like facebook.

[@boonebgorges Keymaster 14 years, 2 months ago]

If everyone’s going to be friends with everyone else, I’d suggest just turning the Friends component off since it won’t be doing anything interesting. Dashboard > BuddyPress > Component Setup

As for groups, you have a few options. If you make all groups public, then everyone will have access to everything. And if you hide all of the “my groups” and “join this group” buttons in the theme, people will never know (or care!) whether they’re a part of groups. They’ll just be auto-joined if they choose to post on the forums. A different method is to modify something like this: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/auto-join-groups/

[@ibnnadir Member 13 years, 8 months ago]

Boone wrote:
If everyone’s going to be friends with everyone else, I’d suggest just turning the Friends component off since it won’t be doing anything interesting. Dashboard > BuddyPress > Component Setup

But, without friend feature, we cannot get @mention feature. Anyone can help me with this problem?

[@ibnnadir Member 13 years, 8 months ago]

I’m sorry, @mention can be got although without friend relationship, but I can’t invite someone to join any group without friend feature…

[@chrisjscott Participant 13 years, 7 months ago]

I’d like this feature as well, as the only way to send direct messages to other users is if they’re friends. I need a way to either automatically make everybody friends with each other or, conversely, allow messages to be sent to people even if they aren’t friends.