[DaveyWavey]

Thanks so much @djpaul – I did consider the possibility of making the groups private, But our client wants them visible to non-group members (so they have an idea of what the group’s are about) and at the very least not auto-joinable. Adding define(‘BP_DISABLE_AUTO_GROUP_JOIN’,true); to bp-custom.php located at wp-content/plugins seems to have had zero effect on any aspect of my pretty standard BP 1.6+ installation. Like no effect at all. Like it’s not there. So if it’s a feature that is not deprecated why isn’t it working? I ask because I am stumped. Totally.

[DaveyWavey]

I honestly spent hours looking for a suitable answer to this question before posting it here. There were all kinds of solutions available for older versions of WordPress – like adding this line:

`define(‘BP_DISABLE_AUTO_GROUP_JOIN’,true);`

to bp-custom.php but it seems as if there is no longer any need for bp-custom.php in BP 1.6+ – in any event, no matter what I put into the file, it has zero effect on BP, so I assume all bp-custom.php related information is not relevant to BP 1.6+ installs. So what do I do?

Or am I missing something super obvious?

[DaveyWavey]

Wo! Thanks for the response @modemlooper

Does that qualify as a bug? I mean on the one hand you’re allowed to alter slugs very easily but on the other hand, that will generate immediate broken links in an otherwise very important component of buddypress, namely the activity feed.

In any case, I felt I bothered everyone enough, and the idea of creating a script is way beyond my capabilities, so what I did was revert the slug back to groups. I changed the language file as instructed and so the user sees the new name I chose to replace “groups” everywhere except for in the URL which is fine. Better that than to have 404 errors generated by the activity feed!!

Thanks so much for your help and feedback! You too @aces !

[DaveyWavey]

@modemlooper said 4 days, 6 hours ago:
To change slugs you change the page name and URL for that page in the WordPress admin.

That worked perfectly. Almost. It seems that links in the activity feed still reference “groups” as opposed to the new slug so for instance the link should be something like this:

http://www.mysite.com/newslugforgroups/groupname/forum/topic/newforumpost/

instead the groups slug somehow persists and reads like this:

http://www.mysite.com/groups/groupname/forum/topic/newforumpost/

And this above link generates a 404 page not found error.

Old slug: groups
New slug: newslugforgroups

This seems to only occur in the activity feed – everywhere else, your suggestion seems to work just fine.

[DaveyWavey]

@aces : Good call. It was a typo

@modemlooper : Gah. That’s the problem when it seems that searching the support forums on buddypress.org consistently generates really poor results and so you’re forced to use Google. Gah. Thanks for the info man.

I am now editing a zillion line .po file. Woohoo! I guess we’re done unless someone has a suggestion for better buddypress forum searches!

[DaveyWavey]

Jeepers, seriously? Changing the page name worked immediately and now I feel dumb. So what was that bp-custom.php thing all about?? What exactly is that supposed to change?

I suppose I can follow the tutorial at https://codex.buddypress.org/extending-buddypress/customizing-labels-messages-and-urls/ for everything else. Sigh. Thanks!