[buffos]

I solved it as follows

* first buddypress probably does not support sites in non-root folders.
That means that if you have a site in localhost/somesite/wp-contents… etc it will not work

* the problem was not the alternate port :8080 in my case…

* solution was creating a virtual host (by reading http://foundationphp.com/tutorials/apache_vhosts.php , just adding rules for 8080 in my case instead of just just 80)

* after that, i went to .htaccess and changed the RewriteBase from /somesite/ to /
and the last RewriteRule . /index.php [L] from . /somesite/index.php [L]

Now it works fine as a top-level site (i used somesite.dev as the host name and use somesite.dev:8080 to access it). Registration and activation now work fine

[buffos]

looking at the access.log of xampp (apache) i see

::1 – – [17/Dec/2014:23:01:39 +0200] “GET /testbuddy/register/ HTTP/1.1” 200 16168 “http://localhost:8080/testbuddy/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2243.0 Safari/537.36”

::1 – – [17/Dec/2014:23:01:55 +0200] “POST /testbuddy/register/ HTTP/1.1” 200 16202 “http://localhost:8080/testbuddy/register/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2243.0 Safari/537.36”

Anyway, i really cannot understand how buddypress cannot work out of the box in a very simple and standard situation 🙁

[buffos]

No. These latest rules do not work (they break permanlinks)

i am under /xampp/htdocs/testbuddy/wp-content

but making RewriteBase / and RewriteRule . /index.php break permalinks which work fine with
RewriteBase /testbuddy adn RewriteRule . /testbuddy/index.php [L]

[buffos]

* yes , register page is activated
* yes, i can register
* yes, members, activity.. etc.. show fine

==htaccess==

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /testbuddy/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /testbuddy/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

==logs==
no errors

* does buddypress support non :80 ports?