BuddyPress.org

We haven’t got any plans for a 1.5.6 right now

I don’t know how Glotpress works, your best bet is to look at / ask on http://wppolyglots.wordpress.com/

Don’t know. We’ve seen it but not understood the cause yet.

I would avoid using WP Super Cache with BP until we get 1.6 out. Even then, I’d recommend giving page caching a miss. I think we have cache invalidation issues somewhere.

Correct

In a nutshell, if you’re on BP 1.5.x versions, you need to be on BP 1.5.5.
If you’re on BP 1.2.10 or older, you need to be on BP 1.5.5.

Admins to do… what? To engage and interact with the community, I assume?

wp-admin, Settings > Reading

You’re right. They are ignored.

Some versions of BuddyPress require a specific version of WordPress. So if you’re using an old version of WordPress (you should upgrade that asap, obviously), you need to use the version of BuddyPress that last […]

As of BP 1.5 onwards, any BuddyPress component should work when set as the home page.

Gosh. Why do you have that load wp-config.php bit at the top of the file? That’s a big red flag immediately. Are you doing something unusual to include this file into your site?

Is there a reason why you don’t want to use BuddyPress’ Profile Fields? You wouldn’t have to write any code. (wp-admin BuddyPress > Profile)

groups_create_group()

I believe this is affected by a setting in WordPress that creates JPGs at 90% quality compression; try https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jpg-image-qualitycompression/

You want to use Group Forums, not Sitewide Forums, right?

You can definitely write a small helper plugin to unregister the menus. I haven’t got time to figure it out, so may be search for ways to unregister / hide menus, and work from there.

Achievements won’t work when you set BP_ENABLE_MULTIBLOG.

Oh, my.

Changing the chmod of wp-content to 777 won’t actually *break* your site, but maybe something else happened at the same time. I’d suggest popping into the multisite forums at WordPress.org, and […]

I’m not aware that BuddyPress uses a significant amount of CPU. From what they’ve told you, seems like they provide total bare minimum, low-end hosting. In all seriousness, I’d consider finding a different (better) host.