Forum Replies Created
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In reply to: theoretically, is it possible to do this?
@thatmtnman – sounds to me that you just have not played with a few different themes and changing some widgets – that would do about everything you are saying from what I gather. Should be pretty easy to come up with what you are talking about with just some basic theme modifications – a little css color changes and different widgets in the sidebars.
“dying to see how you did it” – I think the site you are talking about just added a bbpress forums plugin and added some topics to the sidebar.
“BP might not be able to handle a high traffic site…” – handles a small site on a shared server fine – handles a site with 10,000 members on a dedicated server just fine (even sharing that dedicated with a dozen other wp and wp-multisite and bunch of other fair traffic sites – so I don’t think that would be an issue.
In reply to: Paid Membership Pro With Buddy Press@ghar123 – I am sure there are many options / different ways to accomplish what you are asking about, my suggestion would be to look at “press permit core” first.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/press-permit-core/
(pretty sure that will do what you need easy)Then take a gander at s2member plugin perhaps..
there are others I am sure.
@rollercoasterider
“that’s the opposite of what I want ”Okay.. do this:
on your admin dashboard
hover over “pages”
click “add new”cursor should be on “enter title here”
title it “welcome”
click into the page content box below – write something like “welcome front page members test”
click publish – the blue button on righton the left under Pages, click “add new”
title it “site blog”
click publish – blue button on rightgo to Settings -> Reading
Where it says “Front page displays” A static page, click in the dropdown there and select “welcome”
the next drop down, “posts page” click drop down, select “site blog”
Save Changes at bottom.Now you should have a static page as your “home page” in your /members directory,
and people can click to members tab to get to your members page.This is your goal?
In reply to: Facebook“is the best?” – that is going to be quite a subjective answer from whoever may answer it.
The best one?! One that does not use facebook at all (IMHO) – privacy. dependency. more important than making it easy for that one person who might actually use it.
In the few cases that I added anything facebook to my sites, I made sure they only loaded assets (like the like button) from local storage, not some iframed pulled from fbook, or some other privacy sacrificinf javascript or something.
If you want to find what you think may be best, install a few from the wp-repo and see how they work, and how they work.. you may find the one that looks best with your theme is what you think the best is.
I will never use a plugin that phones home to Ggl and Fbk for my site to function – it’s bad enough when gravatar slows down page loads – and privacy is not just a personal issue – but in some cases a country laws issue (look at http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/2-Klicks-fuer-mehr-Datenschutz-1333879.html (might have to paste the url into a service that will translate the German to your language)
from the author of “2 Click Social Media Buttons ” – from what I gather some of the common WP things people are deploying are in complete violation of various Euro laws.
(looking at your Google Fonts auto-embedded in WP, and Emoji third party calls, and many theme’s auto use of CDNs for things)and plugins like “Social Media Feather”
are the kind of tradeoffs I might consider when a project requires some third party stuff.
OF course I am no expert on any of this, just some random BP user. Your opinions of whats best may differ.
@dangthrimble – no matter what you do to hide the admin username, the really good hack teams are running scans to get the admin names by running url checks like “yourdotcom /?author=2
?author=3and scraping the details wp is providing both on page, and in meta fields.
Then adding those names to their pass cracking bot nets.
(look in your raw access logs, you will see it)I’ve tried changing names on wp sites many times, the rssn hackers get getting the new names, you can tell if you check your fail log with “limit login attempts” plugin.
I’ve played with some code to change in wp themes to hide details there, but my php is slightly below beginner and my understanding of what the theme code is doing is same.
I tried a plugin from the wp-repo that is supposed to hide all that- but it’s not working.
(you could htaccess geo block ukrain and chna from your site completely and probably prevent 90% of these issues anyway from what I have seen by checking logs)
I found some htaccess someone posted that is supposed to suppress all requests for “/?auth [nc] or something like that – but since I do not understand what each part is doing, I have not deployed it.
I think it needs to be htaccess add and include anything with “author” and a number to work well (reg ex for numbers?)
Until I find a htaccess regex method I understand and trust, I have found that the best combo for prevention is:
Geo IP Block
(https://wordpress.org/plugins/ip-geo-block/ )
(default settings are okay, I think it’s best to change the drop downs to block by country the plugins area, theme area, admin ajax, etc as well – options in settings
Also some blogs may want to uncheck the “comment post” block by country
)If this geoip block plugin author had a donate link I’d already sent him some bucks, it’s the most useful plugin I’ve found since… “good question”
and succuri is an informative add on as well
(shows that some bots have figured out how to bypass the limit login attempts max tries setting)The way WP is handling question marks in urls (string queries I think it’s called) and giving up 200 status codes and extra info (including author names) to bots is a big issue for me, this kind of relates to the unanswered support question I posted here:
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-mark-url-return-200-not-404-string-query-noindex-or?replies=1@rollercoasterider – So it sounds to me like it is working as it should.
Now it appears your goal is to actually have the front page of your wp/bp install to show your “Members” page instead of some other page.
Assuming all is working as it should, now you can go to
Settings -> Reading
Where it says “Front page displays” A static page, click in the dropdown there and select “members”
Save Changes at bottom.I think that is what you are saying you want (?)
@rollercoasterider – so you created a new “page” and that page’s title is “Home”
maybe you created a second “page” and called tha “blog”
You went to: Settings -> reading and selected static front page to show the “page” Home ?
Perhaps blog to the “blog” page)I assume you did the confige bp pages thing ( https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/configure-components/ )
maybe assigning ( https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/register-and-activation-pages/ )
and you are using a default theme like 2014 ?
and when you click on members it goes to home?
Is this the same with all the other plugins deactivated?
Set your permalinks to pretty urls?
In reply to: Content Invisible to Google@baldarab – if you were to create duplicate content in order for it to get indexed, I would add a robots.txt that tells google and others to not crawl / index your pages. It’s bad to have pages with duplicate titles and no meta description- as is the issue with how groups are currently handled in your case and many others… however, having a second page on the site with the exact same content in order to get it indexed may cause the dreaded duplicate content penalty, and perhaps the “thin content” – lower ranking factoring.
Certainly it would be best to get the title and meta descriptions fixed with bp groups (and member pages) as the best solution, but seeing how you are currently using the groups as basically a page with an activity, votes, comments, and related ones.. with a “sign up to add your own” option, – I wonder if it would be best to just delete those “groups”…
Instead I would consider making them just a new “page” of the site.. or if you really want to get into the whole “different users sharing different projects” – kind of instructables kind of thing – with a twist, it may be better to turn on WP multi-site – and make each activity a new “site (blog)”
– doing so would give you the same features – a video, instructions, related activities (posts and sites) – ability to sign up and create your own, comments, etc…
and that would give you the standard WP search indexing options – good page titles, descriptions, etc (not the errors that bP is currently producing for those pages)
just a thought – not exactly sure how you are using the groups thing and what the goal is with it, just glancing at the setup and thinking what I may do…
In reply to: theoretically, is it possible to do this?@thatmtnman – should be pretty easy to put widgets around the activity stream, and so to have content around the activity wall as you are saying.. individual member profiles have an activity stream, and you can change content around the profiles with some theme coding – so I’m pretty sure bp already does what you are asking about right out of the box..
Maybe I don’t understand what you mean by content around activity similar to facbook, I’m not an f-book expert.
In reply to: how to make a good social network@ttpgolf – have you asked the Divi theme people about your issue?
@smdm I had a similar thought about an open source, facebook / myspace alternative – an opportunity for the masses to have ownership of data and a federated system available to the masses – back when Andy Peatling announced he had a plugin to make wp social.
I got excited when BP became a more official thing and launched a couple of projects to go in that direction. I’ve played with a bit of code and lots of plugins.
I have a site running that is very used as an anti-facebook as it was established for exactly that in Feb 2009.
Some years later BP lacks so many things, if I paid myself $1 per hour, and multiplied that my the amount of time spent trying to get BP things working as it should – then I would of been able to buy a dozen licenses for phpfox – I could of used the free dolphin script and bought a couple of mods for it –
It’s July 2015 and this BP thing is still like a black sheep step child lacking basic functions. I’m glad to see some people working on it still – but I’m not sure it is going to be solid enough and complete enough to really peek people’s interest / expectations of what a social thing should be.
I still have some hope, (and a couple of web sites tied to BP) but there are other membership options for WP to make it “more social”, and as far as a uhosted option for multiple groups – I think the joomsocial that was available years ago probably has a better chance of adoption in the way you are describing then this confangled mess of plugins we call BP – the social network in a box – that doesn’t have the basic stuff myspace had a decade ago – lol
In reply to: Why is my Forum Thread not here?@kakumeionline – if your post had three links in it – it will be held for moderation and not appear unless someone approves it.
If your post did not have three or more links in it – then I think akismet has flagged your ip addy as a spammer perhaps – and it got sent to the spam box.
Sometimes adding certain words like “how to add a field for users to choose their S3X, and if they are L3sbian, G@y Trans – will keep a post from saving I think.
Random thoughts from an end user – I don’t really know how the internals of this BP dot org really work (not a forum moderator or anything)
So these are my guesses
@rollercoasteride
disable all plugins except buddypress and twenty-something theme – does it work?
My guess is your wp / BP may work fine without the zippy courses plugin – if it works fine with no other plugins – then your issue is with those plugins, not a BP issue per se.
No WP and BP do not work with default theme and all other plugins disabled?
yes you need permalinks pretty – I think.. when you set that does it actually write to your htaccess file? or is there some text that appears at bottom of screen (below scroll view sometimes) that tells you need to manually add the new htaccess code?
still not work? you may…
Looks like you may have some corrupted files somewhere – I would make a backup of your databases and zip up your files for a backup (there is a reasonable backup thing in softalicious backend) – remove the wp installation through softalicious – remove the whole wp / bp setup – start fresh.
If exporting your database through phpmyadmin, click advanced / add / drop table or something (directions in wp codex)
You can install WP through softalicious and then add BP no problem in my experiences.
(I would not count on softalicious to do your updates, gosh fantistico was horrible at that, and WP has it’s own auto-update thing going on these days anyway)/random thoughts from a user, not a BP dev or anything – other advice may be better.
In reply to: Advice on Hosting@eskymo – if you have the money to burn get a basic vps somewhere and get it started.
my past experiences with “cloud hosting” did not work out – other hosts may differ.
If you have not even started I would not worry about bandwidth or the network growth – sure if you are going to run TV commercials saying join my social network and get free gold bars – then you probably want to worry about that..
I have a solid buddypress site running on a basic shared hosting environment (reseller package they call it I think – gives a little more resources)
I have one running on a VPS, and another on a dedicated server. Even if you get 10,000 members sharing pics and uploading vids I don’t think you will hit bandwidth and growth issues.
You can always copy your database and zip your files to a new host or larger plan at same host if you run into limits.. and of course also look at things to do that would minimize things (block bad robots indexing, cache plugins, etc)
Not sure why you would stick with looking in london hoping to get support on the phone during daytime hours – if I have a host that can’t answer me with support at 2am I move on (and have) to the next one.
With a reasonable host I think you could start at $10 a month.. if can afford get a VPS ~50 a month – dedicated shared resources – better if you are going to setup your BP to also be WP-MS (multi-site / multi-blog (giving users their own “tumblr” type blogs on top of the social networking stuff)
If you grow out of it – great – you can likely afford to go dedicated and look into tuning thing..
/random opinion \ thoughts
In reply to: Content Invisible to GoogleI see how you are using groups – so it does appear that links to them are easily discoverable from your public facing pages.
If you do a view source and look at your code for each of your groups, you will notice that the page title is exactly the same for all of your groups ( <title>Activities – Freaky Rivet</title> ) – and there is no meta name description =
Two major issues for the big G.
Which version of buddypress are you using?
This problem concerns me so much that I have kept one of my sites with an older version of buddypress (2.2.3.1 ) with the cobbled custom code I was able to get from wpmudev ( http://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/bp-meta-tite-description-for-groups-and-members-pages#post-806736 ) – the cobbled code may work the newer version of bp – but things are quite confusing with how wp has changed up some of the title thing, and bp has it’s way of things and there are possible conflicts with priority or something..
The discussion on this trac ticket( https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6107 ) says things have been “fixed” – I do appreciate the devs working on it a bit – but I have a feeling the fix is more of a “make it work in a semi-okay way with a couple of setups” – not much as far as giving users real control over the titles and descriptions.
I am guessing people will point to theme designers to hook this up, and they will point to “we use wordpress’s suggested way of title-ing (wp the title or whatever) – and so it’s wp/bp issue, and descriptions should be handled my an seo plugin – but given that bp’s pages are pseudo pages without any taxonomy registered, it appears that yoast and others have so desire to work with it.
This is my current understanding, and may be not 100% accurate – what I gather after posting many questions and issues relating to this in various places.
I’d pay someone to code a plugin that gives options for bp meta stuff like the suggestion I posted before, and give it to the community. If I could understand all the bp/wp code and php I’d gladly make it. It seems the BP coders are spread a bit thin, so I have no good options for fixing this issue at the moment.
In reply to: [Resolved] Videos from Posts in Activity Stream@d_enajetic – I am playing with a few plugins that deal with a similar issue with animated gifs. A few say they will take a gif and make a thumbnail that you click to play… instead of having a dozen animated gifs playing in the activity stream and sidebar from users posts – hoping one of these will work.
Luckily I have not had the same issue with videos yet (currently most of my users just add videos to activity stream directly, not in a blog post which would double display – glad to be thinking of that as a possible issue now)
In your situation, I wonder if you create a screenshot thumbnail and put a “play icon” on it – then put that at the top of your post… would that show up in the activity stream instead of the video embed? I’d try making that the featured image as well to see if that static image showed up in my sidebar display (instead of the actual video itself)
I would put the screen shot thumbnail image at the top of the post, and then add an H2 tag below something like <h2 id=”playjuneseminar> – then make the screenshot / thumbnail linked to the anchor tag – so that if people clicked the image in the activity stream, or on the actual post itself, it would scroll down to the video.
I’d consider adding a lazy load / play type thing to the video so it does not auto play unless it’s in focus or something.
Not sure if this is what you are going for, or if it would even work, but it’s what I would try first.
Of course it would be cool to see a plugin that combined the “if activity stream item and detect video in post, create a thumbnail, show thumbnail instead of embedded video, link to that section of post, kind of thing.
like a mashup of the wp video posts plugin, with one of these gif stop/create single frame-click-to-play instead of auto, with an added “if image is from a post link to post”
random thoughts from my limited bp / wp experiences.
In reply to: Content Invisible to Google@baldarab – I just took a quick look at your site – where are your “Groups” ? I don’t see any links to what I know of as groups. Do you have to register and login to get a navigation to the groups?
In reply to: Content Invisible to GoogleGo to your main groups page, and an individual group page.
On both do a “view source”
Is there anything in your source that has anything to do with “robots”
(like robots meta noindex)That would be an issue – but I bet it’s just the way buddypress handles the
“meta name description”
and html page “title” for groups, and individual member’s profile pagesG’s Wb Tools always says it’s an issue for my bp sites..
(missing completely, or duplicate your other pages, or too short)This issue was brought up and worked on a bit a few months ago here:
https://buddypress.org/support/topic/bussdypress-title-and-seo-yoast-problem/#post-236324(since then there was some interesting discussion in a trac where I was impressed some of the devs thought about a lot of issues with this – can’t remember the trac # atm)
I also made a suggestion about this issue here:
https://buddypress.org/support/topic/page-titles-meta-desc-option-like-wp-permalinks/Although there was some great work on this issue recently, I think it’s still far from what the big G wants to see.
Given the issues with each group’s lack of good (or any) meta name description, and lame page titles, it may actually be more beneficial to block their indexing with a robots.txt file – as having a bunch of issues there affects the ranking for the rest of your site from what I gather.
In reply to: Chat Plugins with one-to-many messaging?@jacipetersilie – I run the quick chat on a few sites – the ones on vanilla sites are just open to the public and do not show the integration as members options, avatars included, etc.
(like seen here: http://megachatplace.com/chat-rooms/text-chat/ )The other chat systems I run either along side or integrated with BP are adults only / nsfw.. and bp dot org has issues with posting too much about stuff like that from what I gather – and it would take 4 links to s3xy sites to show them..
So I just did a write up page about these, with links to show the examples – if you’d like to read some extra info and rants, you can read the page I wrote about these issues real quick here: http://megachatplace.com/webmasters-chat-considerations/ (THIS site is not pr0n, but I added some NSFW links on that page showing some uses you can check if you like)
In reply to: Any recommended security pluginssuccurri, limit login attempts, “good question”
what kind of security you looking for? people trying to admin login? people probing for theme / plugin vulnerabilities?
In reply to: Activation E-mail failing to send!@zewitchi
btw I tried to sign up an account with your site, and used one of my non-gmail non-yahoo addys, which usually lets everything through (no spm filters and such) and I never got an email – so I would check with your host first.your server support people will usually see something in the error log, or know that they have your account limited in some way that…
tell them you have a wordpress install that is trying to use php to send mail to new registered users, and it seems to not be sending.
either they will change for you, or tell you that you need a different hosting plan in order to use features like that –In reply to: Activation E-mail failing to send!with new servers, I try to use these two plugins:
Have you tried “contact form 7” or “si-contact form” plugins to see if your server allows wp to send emails?on some servers they both work to send an email to my admin email account – on some servers only one of those will work (without tweaking smtp settings and such)
in my limited experience – if neither of those work – then I would write my server people and ask them if some kind of mod sec or php limiting setting that the server company sets would be preventing your wordpress install from sending email via php.
There are other ways to get WP to send emails – but your server people will usually see something in the error log, or know that they have your account limited in some way that either they will change for you, or tell you that you need a different hosting plan in order to use features like that – since they are sometimes abused by the hosting account leasee, or spam / hack programs that hit unsecured php scripts.
(I’m no expert, just had some experiences. I’m sure others know more about this than I do)
btw I tried to sign up an account with your site, and used one of my non-gmail non-yahoo addys, which usually lets everything through (no spm filters and such) and I never got an email – so I would check with your host first.
In reply to: Activation E-mail failing to send!Have you tried it default 2014 theme, bp running, and all other plugins turned off?
Does your server send emails from wp other ways successfully?
(like you go into wp backend add a user and tell wp to send an email with login credentials to yourself to test)Have you tried contact form 7 or si-contact form plugins to see if your server allows wp to send emails?
Have you tested to see if it’s just users that use a gmail addy to try to sign up?
or is it all email services like yahoo, comcast, gmail, everything?Could be a lot of things – but those are the things I would try to figure out first in order to fish out what could be done to make it better.
@carelcadform – sounds like your question is more related to the premium plugin you purchased (?) – have you tried asking them for this support?
I seriously doubt anyone in the BP forums is going to answer this without you posting it as a paid job.
IF they have not answered, have you considered the other events plugins out there?
seems to be a lot of these in the wp plugin repo
and wpmudev has one – albeit expensive – they do have support that answers things.In reply to: Chat Plugins with one-to-many messaging?@danbp –
those are interesting – I’d like to add that anyone considering integrating those should pay close attention to the terms of service, privacy policies, usage restrictions, etc – most that I have found that are “free” either crash ~ 20 users, or are hosted on third party servers that are not in your own control – so reliability, and privacy, third party ads out of your control – stuff like that I always found (aside from quick chat, which runs on own server using sql database I think)
to get a little fancier than quick chat, I have tried more then 50 free / freemium / and premium options out there.. but I had not seen that one pointed out at code canyon – I might buy it and try it to see how it works, unfortunately I have found that even most premium options fail with server load issues once about 20 people are chatting – especially if they use the same mysql that your wordpress is tapping into. I also need to find someone who can go over the code in that one to see how hackable it may or may not be – any suggestions for a security review person?
If you can budget a couple hundred bucks you could get into:
123flashchat, I can say that it is solid enough to keep running for months on end even with lots of chatters.. there is a wp integration kit avail for that premium program – but I have not tried it yet. The support is either really great, or no answer – but I think part of that is my email services auto-blocking stuff from a busy email server in hong kong – and some language barriers.
Another premium option with will require a red5 media server or something similar is av-chat by nusoft – it has buddypress integration that I use – will pull in bp avatars into the chat room and such – it’s pretty solid, and lots of customization options.
( https://wordpress.org/plugins/avchat-3/ )I use these as single page chat rooms, not something site-wide on every page.
@danbp or @moderators – I am pretty sure the comment two above which links “cards” is just purely seo link spam 🙁 –
