[@beckb Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@r-a-y
Looked at the patch, thanks for that. Are you asking whether group activity should be patched to both show the group avatar (which you’ve done) and link to the group home page (which you haven’t yet)? Or am I misunderstanding the Q?

[@beckb Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@gwu123 You know, I’ve heard that (s2member plugin) mentioned a few times now and not yet bothered to investigate. Will finally do.

[@beckb Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@jmarino:
Well, there’s a plugin to restrict group creation. I’d start there: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-restrict-group-creation/

In the settings, you can auto-demote group creators to mods, so that’s good for what you mention. You can also separately determine who can make a public, private or hidden group. It doesn’t have a setting to restrict somebody who meets the threshold from creating more than one group, though. You’d have to work around that. Also, it has settings like minimum number of days as a member (of your BP site in general) before qualifying to create a group, but nothing built in that’d handle maximum number of days as a mod and then demote automatically.

Honestly? You’re looking for very specific and limited functionality. Since you already plan to manually add any additional mods, I’d consider just getting the necessary info from the user when s/he signs up for VIP membership, manually creating the group in the first place (use the Restrict plugin to keep anybody but a site admin from being able to do so), inviting the VIP member to join, and then setting him/her (and any friends) as mod.

As for the 1 year demotion, I’d just use a good calendar and set up an electronic reminder.

Low tech and not very automated, but that really seems like the route you’ll end up needing to go, unless you (or someone else) wants to create a fair bit of custom code–something you probably won’t find people offering to do for free.

…

Not to be a total downer, but I’m having a bit of trouble imagining what enticement mod status would offer. Maybe I just haven’t toyed with it enough to see its utility in managing forums, but it doesn’t seem to provide much control over the group, at least…

[@beckb Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

I was going to do the remove thing, too–so thank you all for the tips–but then I decided I might as well just hide the admin bar from logged out users, as that was my bigger concern with the random visit.anyway. (I don’t think it’ll be especially useful, and our groups are mainly private, but I don’t have any other plans for the top right portion of the screen, so…might as well leave it for now.)

[@beckb Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@crashutah, do you know if that Welcome Pack force acceptance trick (define( 'WELCOME_PACK_AUTOACCEPT_INVITATIONS', true );) has to be done in wp-config, or would it work in a (child) theme’s functions.php?

Wish I could easily auto-force the group but not the friends. Hm. More to think on….

[@beckb Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Sorry, I’m just posting here to remind myself to maybe set up that admin option eventually.

I did at least set up so Facebook Connect users aren’t required to share full names. Currently takes first name + last initial, although ideally I’d prompt them to create their own username. THAT, however, would take a smidge more time/effort.

[@beckb Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Curious. I was convinced I had a similar problem, as I noticed one user marked spammer and then created my own test user but never received the activation email. HOWEVER, I just tried again using a gmail address instead of hotmail, and I got the activation email just fine. Suppose I’ll keep messing with this and check back in…..

I’m trying to use/test the Welcome Pack in particular, so….we’ll see.