That sounds highly like a matter of opinion. What’s the average age of your userbase?
While I’ve had the occasional complaint, I would say that it’s just a normal process. Your users will eventually get used to the site. I would say that BP’s “complicatedness” is somewhere above Twitter’s but below YouTube’s.
I haven’t had anyone complaining, really, but I do have new members constantly saying that it’s going to take them a while to figure out how things work. I’m pandering to a vbulletin forum crowd, but most of them are also Facebookers, so I don’t really understand what’s so confusing for them *shrug*
I don’t understand this site myself since the latest changes. I have no clue which messages are internal mail, or part of a group, or a forum post. I have a hard time finding my previous posts or threads I’d like to follow.
I’ve argued this before: Bolting old-fashioned forum logic (bbpress) on top of the newer social networking structures has thrown Buddypress into disarray. Flame away…
I do agree with you Peter. The BuddyPress.org website has become so complicated, I am actually very confused when using it. It was much simpler before with the old design. Also I do not understand why Private-Messages have disappeared ? The “Followers” and “Following”-stuff is quite complicated as well and not thought through at all.
Anyway, for my website I am going to strip-out the Forums-component, as both Forums and Activity make it quite confusing for my users.
I am actually quite disappointed of BuddyPress due to the promised but missing features e.g. “Privacy”, “Properly Working Private-Groups” and “Blog-Posts from the Front-End” and am thinking of using another software than BP. Also feedback and information from the Core-developers on the status of implementation of those features is lacking considerably.
Once again: KISS (Keep It Simple & Stupid)
First, I think we can all agree on 2 things, BP has some major logic flaws and BP is the best community CMS available today.
Yes, I have received “complaints.”
Most if not all the confusion revolves around the Activity Stream. Logically when you reply to a blog post or blog comment it should show up on the Blog post page, same with forums. Now I have read the debates here on why the Activity Stream should be a separate thing, but to be honest those arguments sound like a Microsoft engineer defending all the IE bugs as an efficient way of coding. Which may be true, but Betamax lost out to VHS, HDDVD lost out to BluRay and IE lost out to open standards. No matter how logical something may be to a programmer the user has the finial word.
PS
If Group Forums are activated that should be the Group default tab. 
I whole heartedly agree with @dennis_h about the forums being the group default tab/group landing page. I honestly don’t even understand the point of having both group forums and group activity streams. It’s very confusing. On my site, I’ve done the little hack found here in the support forums to make groups open directly onto the group’s forum, and put a conditional around the group activity stream post box so that only group admins can even see it.
Well, if you want to use BP to power your site then get your hands dirty and make your site not so “confusing” by hacking away at your BP theme. BP out of the box isn’t the prettiest and most straight forward plugin. If you want your BP powered site to have easy navigation then then dig in to the templates and sort it out or pay someone to sort it out.
I agree with @thelandman OOB Buddypress is the whole kitchen sink but you can cut a ton out via custom themes.
BP groups are basically a facebbook fan page. It has the exact same features. So if people are on FB then they clearly can understand the UI of BP. Maybe changing forums to discussions? It’s the site wide activity feed that in my opinion creates the most confusion.
My students fussed when BP was installed; however, tweaking the child-theme, integrating mediawiki better into BP, and getting the activity stream to the front page helped tremendously. There are tons of plugins that helped, too.
The default BP theme takes getting used to – and – this site’s theme is a little daunting. For example, it is hard to find past forum posts.
Yet, I’m new to BP, my php skills are poor, and my css is trial-n-error. So, BP is a great base and I’m quite satisfied that it’s going in the right direction.
My only real wish-they-had-it-now feature is for the activity stream to be real-time – so that a page refresh is not required when something new happens. Other than that – I’m learning BP through everyone’s suggestions here (ripping out php files, changing css, etc). I do look forward to 1.3
@modemlooper
what do you mean when saying “Maybe changing forums to discussions?”
you mean just changing the wording from Forum to Discussions or do you mean anything else ?
Many thanks,
I also hate buddypress.org since they started to “eat their own dog food”. Ironic. I find is very difficult to find past postings. And the whole “comment on a forum post in the stream *OR* in the original thread” is absolutely insane. When a user makes a comment… don’t make them THINK about where to make it. They should just make the comment and it should show up in *BOTH* places. I think that is by far the biggest usability problem with BP right now. It also drives me crazy how you can message anyone by typing their username in “Compose > Sent To” but only your friends show up in auto-complete. Makes no sense. So you get the proper feedback for friends… but not for other people who are equally legitimate recipients.
I think the system fine my self. Just one thing I have to say. Dont use the forum system as your main forum use spf. the froum is fine for group but dont use it on your main part. Group should not get cool stuff like the main end any how. So I have no problems.
I also hate buddypress.org since they started to “eat their own dog food”. Ironic. I find is very difficult to find past postings.
bp.org needs a tab with forum topics started similar to the “My Topics” tab on the forums tab available on a stock BP install.
The whole “eat your own dog food” logic doesn’t really apply well on a site like bp.org because bp.org is not supposed to be like a social site. It’s more of a developer community that isn’t activity stream centric. Even Facebook uses an older version of PunBB for their developer community, FB doesn’t eat their own dog food.
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And the whole “comment on a forum post in the stream *OR* in the original thread” is absolutely insane. When a user makes a comment… don’t make them THINK about where to make it. They should just make the comment and it should show up in *BOTH* places.
I brought up this issue a long time ago when BP 1.2 was being built. Easier said than done I’m afraid. That’s why there’s a “disable activity commenting for blog posts and forum threads” in the BP admin area. If it was easy, I’m sure it would have been implemented.
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It also drives me crazy how you can message anyone by typing their username in “Compose > Sent To” but only your friends show up in auto-complete. Makes no sense
Actualy, it does make sense. You’d most likely message your friends for the most part. This also helps prevent PM spam. If you really wanted to message someone, you could go to their profile page and message them. Or if you intend to message them more than once, become their friend.
Your request could be extended via a plugin (which doesn’t exist yet!).
there are internet-developers and long-time internet-pros on this forum, not even those experts who have spend their last few months with BP understand how to use bp.org (as per comments above). Imagine newcomers: they will have no chance understanding bp.org
@r-a-y, @takeo
And the whole “comment on a forum post in the stream *OR* in the original thread” is absolutely insane. When a user makes a comment… don’t make them THINK about where to make it. They should just make the comment and it should show up in *BOTH* places.
I totally agree about this. Forum posts, blog posts, blog comments, activity streams, etc… It should all integrate with each other and show up in the same place. Was this ever submitted as a trac ticket?
@paulhastings0 –
https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1419
I closed this myself after the “Disable activity stream commenting on blog and forum posts” setting was created in the BP admin area.
Feel free to reopen it.
There is a lot of discussion about symptoms. I believe the core problem is the pile-up of similar features that all get their own database tables – blog posts AND forum posts etc.
You really only need three basic building blocks; users, posts, comments. Less is more. Most of the issues discussed in this thread are just different ways of displaying data from those three building blocks.
Because the confusion starts in the core, you can’t really fix it in custom themes. If Buddypress was more coherently architected it would be a lot easier to provide a forum view or a blog view or a group view etc.
@r-a-y
I brought up this issue a long time ago when BP 1.2 was being built. Easier said than done I’m afraid. That’s why there’s a “disable activity commenting for blog posts and forum threads” in the BP admin area. If it was easy, I’m sure it would have been implemented.
This is what I was commenting on. I remember reading how difficult it would be, but I also remember some developers defending the Activity Stream as a separate thing. I don’t know how the conversation ended because it was locked and moved to some special dev forum. I hope this is something they are working towards.
BTW: For those looking for a plugin that gets you a little closer to a integrated Activity Stream (plus other great features) you should check out @nuprn1 ‘s BuddyPress Forums Extras Plugin:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-group-forum-extras/
Somewhere recently someone posted “IS BP dieing a slow death?” No. It’s going through growing pains. One of the things needed is more child themes. Not just to make it easier for everyone to have a cool looking site, they are needed to open up ideas on how BP can be used, and that will lead to a better user experience.
We went from a WP and phpbb powered site to BP about 3 months ago and made several mistakes. First, we used a “premium” BP theme (highly modified). Because premium themes need to be designed to work on any site they are filled with extra bloat (with almost all premium WP themes the bloat has got way out of hand, but that’s another rant). This killed our sever. The point being it lead us to develop a new theme from scratch, which was very eye opening and lead us to think outside the normal default theme. You would be surprised how much you can do by just rethinking the navigation and never touch the core. (I’ll post a link when it goes live in about a week.)
The second mistake we made was throwing every feature and extension at them all at once. We wanted to give them every tool we could. This of course lead to even more confusion. Having to do it over again I would have slowly rolled out each new feature one at a time so members could get a better understanding of what it was and how it was different from other features.
The good news is after a couple months the regulars caught on and slowly lead the newcomers. Since launch 3 months ago we added around 4,000 registered members are are currently adding more than a thousand per month.
@dennis_h
could you please drop me the URL of your successful website ? Would be interested to have a look.
Many thanks !
@Erich73
If you want to check out the before picture here it is (black and purple): http://filmmakeriq.com
The new one should be up on or before July 4th, maybe as soon as this week (light gray and blue).
Hello everyone. I am having a slight problem with the budypress plug in. It wants to take over my website and change the face of it.
I am looking to install a social network as part of the wordpress blog, not in place of it. I would like it to reside in mydomain.com/buddypress or something like that. I am a Star Trek podcast and we want to create a social network like we had on ning, but if we have to migrate to an alternative, why not just take it in house and host it on our own server. So basically when you go to my home page which is at http://www.LouTrekShow.com you can see a link to our social network which would be http://www.LouTrekShow.com/buddypress and then the social network will pop up where people can hang out.
Is it possible to do this with buddypress??
Thank you.
@loutrekshow
You are in the wrong section of this forum.
please start a new thread regarding your issue within the Forum “How-To and Troubleshooting”
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/
@r-a-y, I reopened the ticket. Thanks. 
@peterverkooijen
“….You really only need three basic building blocks; users, posts, comments…..”
users, post, comments: I would call this a Forum. So as I have deactivated the Activity-component from my own page now, it actually looks like a Forum with some Groups now, which is fine !
@Erich73 I mean changing the name because calling it a forum is not really the right terminology when people are set in their head about what a forum really is. “discussions” seems like a better choice of wording as you posting “topics” that people discuss.
Maybe having a main forum but inside groups call it discussions like on facebook.
