[mojomo]

@ vapvarun: Following your advice, I switched back to the default WP theme (2017), turns out that BuddyPress works fine with the default theme and all plugins activated. It seems to be an issue with my theme after all. The theme devs are looking into this matter now. Thank you.

[mojomo]

When I hit “add friend”, I get a status 200, but then nothing happens. Must be related to the wss server connection problem:

Answer headers (358 B)
cache-control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
content-encoding: gzip
content-type: application/json
date: Sun, 17 Jun 2018 21:05:13 GMT
expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
server: nginx
strict-transport-security: max-age=15552000
vary: Accept-Encoding
x-ac: 2.fra _dfw
X-Firefox-Spdy: h2
x-hacker: Oh, Awesome: Opossum
Request headers (593 B)
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Accept-Language: de,en-US;q=0.7,en;q=0.3
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: tk_tc=VbGaKeYfZcGE1k%2FX; _ga=GA1.2.2003267383.1528878280
Host: public-api.wordpress.com
Referer: https://public-api.wordpress.com/wp-admin/rest-proxy/
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel …) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest

In the console it says
Cannot establish connection to server wss://public-api.wordpress.com/pinghub/wpcom/me/newest-note-data

I am running my website on a subdomain with the latest WordPress version 4.9.6

Any idea how to solve the server connection problem?

[mojomo]

I was able to fix the avatar issue. The Firefox add-on Ghostery caused the problem. Deactivating the add-on brought back the avatars.

However, the “add friend” button is still not working. When I deactivate all plugins except for BuddyPress, the problem persists.

[mojomo]

Thanks @vapvarun, I tried that before and it almost broke my site. I stopped the process and went back to my main theme. By then I had lost all of my Composer settings, so I’d rather not try that again.

The only thing I found that helps temporarily, is switching off Jetpack. Then at least the avatars in the footer widgets (such as who’s online) come back, but the avatars don’t reappear on the member pages. And as soon as I refresh a page, the footer widget avatars are gone again.