[Rachel Biel]

Thanks, @wiste… Yes, I still come over here when something goes wrong. 🙂 But, things have been pretty smooth over there lately. Members are still confused about how to use it, but I do a lot of hand holding and eventually they catch on. I’m not going to mess with it anymore and just hope that over time, new updates will make things simpler for people. I appreciate your effort in replying!

[Rachel Biel]

Thanks, @danpb. It looks like that worked, although the feed is not detecting an image. We are using RSS Multi-Importer to pull in feeds for this page: http://www.tafaforum.com/tafamemberblogs

I added the feed as you suggested and it pulled our last post (Selling on Etsy), but no image. When I registered the blog using http://www.tafaforum.com/blog/, it pulled all of the activity stream into this page.

I checked the jetpack version that is connected to my WordPress.com reader and it’s pulling everything over there. Does that mean that when people sign up for the blog, they are getting the Activity Stream posts, too?

I was able to register your forum version on Networked Blogs and it looks like it is just pulling the post (with an image): https://www.facebook.com/TAFAList So, that’s great.

Thank you!

[Rachel Biel]

Can somebody help me with this? I know that there are a ton of other threads asking for help, but I think this is really important in terms of making the blog on a site using BuddyPress usable on social media sites. I can’t list the rss feed anywhere because the feed pulls the whole activity stream and we don’t need all of our comments and activity spread all over the place, just the blog posts.

I’m surprised that more people are not bothered by this. Or, is this just happening on my site?

[Rachel Biel]

A related issue is how forum post links show up elsewhere. For example, we have a private group on facebook and I am directing them to the various forum topics that I am creating. All of the links show up as TAFA Forum Group. It gets really confusing if you post a lot of them. I would think this also has to do with how the permalinks and feeds show up. I don’t know if this is a buddypress or bbpress issue, but I hope it’s addressed in future updates. Social media is a part of our world now and buddypress needs to be able to function just as wordpress does if content can have viral potential.

[Rachel Biel]

I had the same problem with one of my users and found that w3-total-cache was causing the problem.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/

I disabled it and she could post again.

Check the support area of your hyper cache plugin and see if others are reporting stuff there. W3-Total-Cache was full of people reporting bad things happening…

[Rachel Biel]

Thanks, Hugo. I understood about half of what you said. 🙂

I think I do pretty well for someone who kicks and screams at code, but have huge gaps of knowledge. Not everything makes sense or is intuitive. Once I do something, it sinks in. Thick skulled, I guess….

[Rachel Biel]

OK, I’ll try that tomorrow. I did look for some tutorials, but every one I looked at assumed that you already knew where to create the file… 🙂

[Rachel Biel]

Thank you, @mercime, but where do you create the file in the first place? I suppose I can go google it, but am so exhausted…… whew!

[Rachel Biel]

@hnla, since you have been patient with me so far, Hugo, can you help me with my initial question of the Activity streams? I found the following and made notes in my forum help area on my site:

I want to disable replies on the Activity Streams because they do not carry through to the original post in the Group Forums.

My notes on how to do this:

Post on why this is confusing: http://commonsinabox.org/groups/help-support/forum/topic/your-members-might-be-confused-activity-stream-comment-vs-group-forum-reply/

Discussion about this on GitHub: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/commons-in-a-box/issues/73

Solution by boonebgorges (one of the BuddyPress authors):
Putting this line in your functions.php or bp-custom.php file will disable all activity stream commenting:

add_filter( ‘bp_activity_can_comment’, ‘__return_false’ );

Note on bp-custom.php file:
Creating your file

bp-custom.php does not exist by default. If you don’t have a file located at /wp-content/plugins/bp-custom.php, go ahead and create a blank file with the following:

?
1
2
3
< ?php
// hacks and mods will go here
?>
Next, save the file as “bp-custom.php” and verify that this file is located at /wp-content/plugins/.

Now, when you encounter a forum thread telling you to put a code snippet in bp-custom.php, you’ll know what to do!
See: https://codex.buddypress.org/developer/customizing/bp-custom-php/

Action:
How is this done? Do I go to my control panel and create a file there?

[Rachel Biel]

@hnla, Hugo, I was able to figure it out! (Jumping up and down!)

I got it to work! Whew!

I did a lot of different things, including installing an older version of bbPress, but I don’t know if that matters. Actually, it probably does, because I was then able to see the forums on the backend again.

What did seem to make a difference was downloading the Members Plugin and changing the roles for Administrator. A bunch of them were not checked, including the role of a Participant. I checked everything and was able to post again. I then updated to the latest version of bbPress.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/members/

I hope that it doesn’t do this again. A major pain! It took me all day to try different things and get it to work.

[Rachel Biel]

I did clean my browser’s cookies and have W3 Cache installed. There is nothing recent on the bbpress site on this issue.

What should I do, Hugo?

[Rachel Biel]

Thanks, Hugo. I do appreciate the dialog, but now there is another issue and I’m at my wits end. I was trying different editors the skinny one that BuddyPress provides now is not so great. All of a sudden, I could not post in forums. I had lost my permissions as an administrator. I was already tired and worked on it for two hours, scouring the forums again, even finding you in the threads I was looking at, and finally got it fixed by using an old bbpress file in your repository and then doing an update as one guy suggested. The forum was back, I could post again, I went to sleep.

Woke up and it’s the same thing. This is really awful. I would love to get involved, volunteer, etc., but I already sit at the computer 10 hours a day for very little income and last night I lost a $100 ad because the site wasn’t working. Hopefully, she will still do it, but now I am really nervous about BuddyPress’s stability. I’ve invested hundreds of hours in the last six months getting this thing to work and now it finally seemed like we were moving forward and this happens. I really am overwhelmed.

Is there a fix that is working to restore admin privileges?

[Rachel Biel]

I’ve been thinking about the concept of gratefulness since I last posted here, an hour and a half ago. This is how I feel about BuddyPress right now:

It’s like a community group having a housing fund and giving me a really nice house to live in. It has ceramic tiles in the kitchen and bath, wood floors, a nice yard, some beautiful accents, and it’s just lovely. But, there are no windows. The spaces are there for them, but they are empty. Rain and cold can get in.

Those with money, will have them installed with the latest and the best.
The Renaissance guys will build something funky and cool themselves.
Some of us will be able to hang curtains or blankets to keep the cold out.
But a lot of the old, the sick, the weary, will just live with the holes and appreciate having a roof over their heads.

Would I get rid of the house? No! I would probably fit in the blanket category, but it’s less than ideal.

(Make you smile?)

[Rachel Biel]

OK, I just thought it would make it easier for you guys to respond to similar issues on one type of topic and that people reading through threads might find their answers there as they read through responses instead of trying to read through so many threads. I always check similar threads before posting because I don’t want to bother you guys.

[Rachel Biel]

Thanks, Hugo. But, is there a way to disable commenting on the Activity Streams without knowing code? That is exactly what I want to do.

If not, can you point me somewhere where there is info on how to do it? There is just too much info to dig through.

The only thing that I have found is in BuddyPress>Settings where it says:
Blog & Forum Comments Allow activity stream commenting on blog and forum posts

I unchecked the box and the Reply option still shows on the Activity Streams page and on the Group Home pages.

I worked with FrontPage for years, then with DreamWeaver and have navigated around on many different types of platforms. I do understand a bit of code and I do understand all of the work that goes into all of this. But, I don’t have the confidence to mess with the files and with the constant updates from WordPress, plugins, and theme, I would much prefer to work with settings than to mess with things that might later conflict with future updates, etc. I did a lot of reading and looked at many options before choosing to go with BuddyPress, but I had no idea that it would be so hard. I set up WordPress sites for other people and am a good tweaker, so it’s not like I am totally green. But, there are some major flaws as can be seen by all of the distressed people flooding the forums here and on bbPress.

When I started up in January, everything was a mess with the new updates. The theme I had bought took several months to work out their incompatibilities, various plugins were going through revisions, etc. Now, finally, almost everything seems to work, but our members are totally confused and I just want to make it as simple as possible for them.

So, when you say, “Commenting on items in the activity stream such as forum entries has always had issues and the advice and best practise generally has been to disable commenting on such items in the activity stream in order to avoid this confusion.”, then, yes. I do expect that issues that come up regularly for you developers should be addressed and fixed, especially when it can cause so much confusion for the end users. If it’s an inherent problem, then we should have a button in the settings area where we can turn off that problem.

I also provide loads of free technical assistance to my people, so I do appreciate what all of you do. I believe in the WordPress model, encourage other people to use it, and now have had these months to try to learn BuddyPress. Would I recommend it to other groups and organizations? Not unless they have the money to hire their own code people (which I don’t). Are there better options out there? I ran a Ning group for a couple of years and it did what I want this forum to do: groups with topical discussions. But, I hated how it looked, found it clunky and wanted the freedom that BuddyPress offers in adding on WordPress pages. I tried several other platforms, too. All were a mess. There are some very nice cloud options but they are expensive and I’m doing the “starving artist” routine, so it’s not fun. So, I think BuddyPress has the potential to be the top model, but it’s not there yet, at least not “out of the box”. IMHO

Anyway, if there is a fix for this, please point me the way and I’ll try to make it happen. Thank you.

[Rachel Biel]

Mine was also super slow and we moved from Blue Host to MDD Hosting and that took care of most of it. I also installed W3 Total Cache because I was told to… It’s much better! http://www.tafaforum.com

[Rachel Biel]

RTMedia looks like it’s going to be the best solution, but it still doesn’t work properly on my site. I keep testing it at each update, but so far, no luck… 🙁

[Rachel Biel]

I found a tutorial by Spencer Forum that had step-by-step instructions that I think cleared up my issues.  I was able to change the slugs and I think things are working correctly in the forum area now.  Here is his tutorial which will hopefully benefit others:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8mh3f6Vzbo

Now I’m having problems with registration.  I opened it up so that a few of our members could register and I could test what happened.  Two of them couldn’t access their profiles and kept getting the wordpress log in page.  Spence’s video also addressed some of that and I hope that the changes I made will fix that.  But, more importantly, I have been looking for a plug-in that will allow people to apply for entry to the site.  This site is going to be a free forum for our membership organization.  The plug-ins that I have seen are for paid memberships and have a lot more weight than I want (configuration with Pay Pal, etc.).

I did install the membership plug-in which hopefully fixed the problems I had with the two members, but that doesn’t offer any kind of registration options.  I would like it to operate like private Facebook groups: apply and get let in.

 

[Rachel Biel]

I don’t know if it is Wanguard either, but from the Wanguard list of users, the ones that are having problems have a No Status under their Wanguard status and the others have a green “checked”.

But, I want to make the site private, by email invite only, too.  How did you do that, @jrcdyer?