[inge12]

@aces and @ synaptic
Thank you so much for your helpful replies!

[inge12]

@aces
Thanks for the useful links. I may have need for the info going on. (I’m bookmarking the pages.)

However, it still doesn’t answer my question of where to find the sign-up form. It seems like that’s what I need to modify to change/add information to this paragraph:

Registering for this site is easy, just fill in the fields below and we’ll get a new account set up for you in no time.

Or maybe I’m just too inexperienced to see the obvious?

(By the way, my previous post was formatted strangely, seeing all the code was enclosed in ... )

[inge12]

Leofitz, WangGuard will check your user base for spammers and delete them.

See https://wordpress.org/plugins/wangguard/

The author says that “WangGuard not only protect your site from sploggers, spam users or unwanted users, WangGuard cleans your database from them. No plugin or service does this, only with WangGuard you will get this feature,” and I believe him. His English may not be too good, but the plugin is really outstanding.

There’s just one consideration for you: In order to have your database cleaned up, you will have to submit far more than 500 queries the first month. Perhaps you can arrange to pay for a month?

Here’s my suggestion to reduce database queries after that. (It worked for me.) Buddypress allows for the customization of User Profiles. Add a couple of questions that require a certain amount of intelligence to answer and make them required. That means the form will not be submitted either to WordPress or to WangGuard if the required fields are not filled out. It’s not fool-proof, but it decreased queries on my very busy site to just a few a day.

Incidentally, I added a question, “How do you plan to participate?” Among the choices offered the user are these:
“I want to increase my online presence.” and
“I want to sell my stuff.”

We don’t need anyone not bright enough to figure out that these replies do not make the user desirable. Now all I need is a script to automatically kick out users who choose these replies. 😉 (As it is, they can be manually deleted if other users report them.)

I don’t know what happens to a group when all the users are unsubscribed, so this may not be precisely what you are looking for. But WangGuard will make your site secure against almost all sploggers. (One registrant passed all tests on our site, and we had to delete manually, but that person must have registered manually too.)

Good luck!

Inge (http://ssnet.org)

[inge12]

In searching for a solution to my problem of unwanted sidebars I found https://codex.buddypress.org/developer/theme-development/a-quick-look-at-1-7-theme-compatibility/ which provides instructions of how to insert BP specifications into a child theme.

To get the results you want, you need to first create a child theme for your main wordpress theme. Then you put the specifications that apply only to the BuddyPress portion of the site into the child theme. You would need to do this:

So if we want to remove the sidebar for BP pages but not for all WP ‘pages’ or call a specific BP sidebar get_sidebar(‘buddypress’), we could take a copy of page.php and rename it to ‘community.php.’ and have BP use this file for all it’s requirements, as can be seen from the order above the first two files will not be found but the third will be and therefore used.

And so will I – to solve my problem.

[inge12]

A solution to this problem will also help me understand the problem with my page lay-out. (Seems like I have to comment in order to subscribe to this thread.)

[inge12]

One plugin that looks good for preventing registration spam is WangGuard. (Search for it in the WordPress repository.) I’ve just installed it, so can’t tell you if it’s as good as it sounds. (I run a very busy blog and allow commenting by unregistered users. Akismet catches spam and Conditional Captcha deletes it without my seeing it. The latter reduced spam from hundreds of comments a day [marked by Akismet] to near-zero. Only the occasional human spammer gets in.)

Allowing unmoderated registrations is spammer nirvana. 😉 I allowed posting by unregistered users so I could turn off user registration. Now that I’m wanting to use Buddypress, I had to enable registration but installed WanGuard. Within a few hours, I had one registration attempt — even though Buddypress can’t be seen anywhere on the site yet — but no successful registration, thanks to WangGuard. Tomorrow will tell me more.