[bobs12]

Now… my spambusher script gives me some very rudimentary statistics… and in the 2 days and 9 hours since that post above, the number of spam registrations has gone up 50%… but the number that I actually delete myself has gone down by about the same number

Which tells me two things:

1. People or bots are actually following the link above and tripping the spambush

2. Links to buddypress sites from buddypress.org are just ASKING to be spammed

[bobs12]

There’s a fairly simple and foolproof method to automate spammer deletion. It’s easier to let them in and then delete them automatically than to try to stop them from registering in the first place. Otherwise it becomes an ‘arms race’ type of thing, as well as a game of keep-up-with-BP/WPMU-changes if you try to integrate it.

See it in action at http://visarus.co.uk/bp-spambusher.php – every time you visit that page you will be cleaning up spam registrations for me I can put it on CRON if I want but I enjoy the satisfaction of seeing how many registrations I’ve deleted 40 in the last 24 hours.

[bobs12]

It’s a lot easier to do the whole thing from MySQL. One query, one click to mark 95% of spammers as spammers (or delete them if you want) and you can modify the query to do anything with anything they left behind them. I clean up their ‘activity’. Marked almost 400 spammers last night and only had to manually check and mark 4 or 5 more.

Don’t hold your breath for a plugin – I did, and I went blue in the face

[bobs12]

Why do success and error messages all come up in a red box?

[bobs12]

1.1.x (whatever it was) was great. I had an activity stream widget on the front page, so I could immediately see (well, once I’d deleted all the spam registrations) who’d been doing what and where, and I click to go and view the context and respond in the same place.

Now I get the feeling that BuddyPress is a platform for creating communities of BuddyPress users

Now there is no profile wire (I renamed it to ‘wall’ because nobody understood what a ‘wire’ is) – it was an absolutely fantastic way for me to greet new users and have a bit of open chat with them.

Now there is this @username nonsense which I don’t understand myself (I am not and never will be a twitter user) – where does that post go? It shows up as if it’s my (Facebook-style) status update. Someone can reply to it but I can’t reply to their reply. All continuity has been lost. I can see the advantage of AJAX replies in the activity stream, but not when it seems a random factor whether the post will appear only in the stream or whether it will appear at source..

The default theme is awful (1.1.x or whatever I had was beautiful, right out of the box) – It took me forever just to get the home page working with two widget columns (surely that wouldn’t have been hard to include in the release..?) but the profile page… ooooh no, it’s a disaster In 1.1.x I had no problems tweaking the profile page to make it do what I want… with 1.2 it defaults to the awful activity stream and I have to click through to profile on every user to see if he comes from xgGT54GRerju and works at Ox8iHghuf34 before I delete him as a spammer.

I started using BP because I needed to replace an ancient platform that I’d written myself ages ago, and I wanted something reliable and extensible because I just don’t have the free time to work on my site anymore. BP 1.1.x was exactly what I wanted (I tried Elgg and some other yucky, heaving nonsense before stumbling on the beautiful BP).

But now it’s just gone off on an utterly bizarre tangent and lost all its intuitive user- (and admin-)friendliness

I know it’s free and I know I’m moaning and not being productive but I really can’t write plugins or themes for BP (much as I would love to – I can’t even work out how to put the wire back) but I feel it’s very sad to see something so good (and so free) go so wrong

[bobs12]

The 1.2 release of BP has gone all wrong My users aren’t Twitter users or technophiles of any description – BP is now too complicated for me to get my head round, and I’m supposed to be the one running the site based on it, so I can hardly expect my users to be able to understand.

The profile wire – why, why did you take it away? 1.1.x was fantastic, now I am beating my head against the keyboard trying to work out how to bring it back after I updated to 1.2 just so I could install a gallery plugin.

The wire (once I’d renamed it to ‘wall’ so my users would understand what it was) was about the only thing that my members really used for public exchange. I installed BP to replace an outdated site platform that I’d built from scratch years ago, thinking that it would take the hard work out of maintaining the site… oops, I was wrong

[bobs12]

Greetings folks! Sorry to drag up an old topic. Please don’t shoot me. A few things for my first post:

1. Buddypress ROCKS. I wasted loads of time messing around with Elgg (fell for the hype). Buddypress is a million times better, straight out of the zip file.

2. I agree that the layout can be improved, but if you don’t customise your OpenSource site, it will look like everyone else’s, right?

3. Let me know if I am doing this right – I decided to change the layout of the user profile page. I went into wp-content/themes/bp-sn-parent/profile/index.php and just shifted relevant chunks of code around. Hardly difficult even for an amateur, and I’m pleased with the results. Is this the right way to go or are you supposed to do it some other way? Seems to me the final layout is hardcoded in this file, and this must be the place to mess around with the code.

4. If the above is right (remember I went through Elgg paaain, nothing there is as it seems) then any educated monkey can make his own theme or at least mangle the default into something he likes I would even have a go at it myself… who knows, one day I may become a household name…

5. Plugins… please, please, write plugins, fix the broken ones, make some cool ones like ‘how you’re connected’ and all that nonsense. Gallery. Ajax for posting to walls. Can’t we call it a wall and not a wire, ’cause my users are not alternative social networking freaks and don’t have a clue why it’s called wire. Buddypress is the future of opensource social networks, Elgg is for losers Half the Elgg ‘plugins’ crash your site on activation, one made my PC have a nervous breakdown (running locally) and it’s slow and stupidly convoluted. If I could get my head round the way they work I’d write my own… but I can’t yet