Right now when plugins add things to the activity stream they have control over what name to show, full name, username, first name, last name…. this makes for a pretty inconsistent looking stream. There should be a setting in BuddyPress where the owner can pick what name to use in activity streams (full,username, etc…), and plugins should call on this variable when populating the action property in bp_activity_add().

Example:

Mike updated a page
Mike Nichols added a forum
Nichols Created a group
nicholmikey added a link

Looks bad, but if I can control over this on the dash board I could have something more consistant like :

nicholmikey updated a page
nicholmikey added a forum
nicholmikey Created a group
nicholmikey added a link

[@djpaul Keymaster 13 years, 6 months ago]

Thanks for the feedback. For the iterim, it’ll be quicker to resolve by asking those plugins’ authors to change their behaviour to match core.

[@hnla Participant 13 years, 6 months ago]

An excellent point to highlight, Plugins should really not be doing this it’s pretty poor.

[@mikepratt Participant 12 years, 10 months ago]

Paul – Do you know off hand if a hook exists to modify the place in core that records the name in the activity table? I know you suggested usernames to match core to @nicholmikey btu I’d like to look into modifying that so first Name Last name are recorded instead….site wide. for our purposes, usernames in the activity stream just throw people off. Trying to go full facebook with full names. Thanks

[@djpaul Keymaster 12 years, 10 months ago]

Hi Mike. It actually uses the xprofile default ‘name’ field, then display_name, then user_nicename, in that order of priority.

This part of an activity is hardcoded in the ‘action’ column of the activity db table; you’d also have to change it on the way in with filters. e.g. groups_activity_created_group_action