The bp-capabilities value somehow had got changed to author rather than administrator.
I edited the bp-capabilities item for user_id 1 in bp_usermeta table to be
a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;s:1:”1″;}
and logged in again and everything was fine.
If you have multisite, you may need this thread which I used to find the place to start looking for the solution.
I tried their bp_settings and it gave me a ‘you are not authorised to view this page’ message, so I used my value above for my non-multisite installation.
I have seen this before on forums. Sometimes this problem is caused by extra whitespace (spaces etc) inserted into the places where you made your edited changes.
