[TireKicker]

Paul,

I got one e-mail from you just now regarding my “second warning”…do you realize that I don’t keep up with your friggin’ life so it’s only now with that e-mail that I see a bunch of threats on your personal activity stream or whatever you call it — until then I had no idea commiserating with a fellow would-be prospective user was a crime….

Anyway, don’t worry, I’ve already abandoned your little echo chamber of a sandbox here for Simple:Press.

Good luck selling ButtPress to normal people!

[TireKicker]

LOL

Such an obvious “feature” doesn’t exist?? The BP activity stream really posts the entire forum post???

Ridiculous….

[TireKicker]

AFAIK, as a prospective user like you evaluating all WP options, BP sounds ideal…but getting it to actually work seems like the bad ol’ days before Windows 3.1!!

[TireKicker]

Roger Coathub and Oldrow are correct; group forums may be interesting from some esoteric highly technical geek perspective, but for normal end-users it’s just not helpful, period. Why can’t it be turned off easily? I mean, I see that there’s an option to do this but then things seem to go nuts with bbPress….

[TireKicker]

The problem is that there is no introduction to this kind of ethos, this BuddyPress ethos.

I suspect that many here are either geeky types who are used to this Web 2.0 mindset or people born during the ’90s who never knew any other way of doing things.

Some of us may be older and thus used to a very “orderly” — that is, tightly hierarchical — way of presenting information…it would help to explain BuddyPress in the FAQ section with such folks in mind.

BuddyPress sounds promising…but there is simply no documentation explaining the philosophical assumptions behind it, never mind individual toggles for specific components….

Me, I’d like for my site’s registered users to be able to create their own particular interest groups and user profiles but limit forums to a traditional site-wide kind of affair…seems like it should be possible to do all this, but I can’t see how in the available documentation I’ve been able to piece together!

[TireKicker]

OMG, finally a support site that’s worse than what you get at Drupal.org…yes, I too can’t find my way around here. No wonder everyone uses the ’90s-looking phpBulletin software for a forum! Can’t believe this BuddyPress is from the same folks behind WordPress — but then again, maybe the WordPress site was a mess at first, too….

Part of the problem is that everyone’s (that is, everyone “normal” and not on Facebook all the time) expecting a standard forum with an orderly hierarchy whereas this BuddyPress way of doing things is…chaotic.

[TireKicker]

Post Scriptum:

I also notice that replies are not “staggered” or whatever they’re called, placed visually underneath the comment it’s responding to…like I said: confusing!

[TireKicker]

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Yes the obvious answer would be “install it in a ‘sandbox’ and try it out for yourself” but isn’t that what this site is supposed to be, right here, that very sandbox, that very demonstration? And I’m saying it’s confusing to n00bz from Web 1.0! And I’m asking whether there’s some way of adjusting the views, ultimately, in an admin panel or something, to look differently for those of us interface-fascists stuck to our old reactionary ways!

I think I get the idea of groups, but I don’t see how that’s so special from what was available on traditional forums, with a hierarchy of headers and forums/sub-forums (fora?) thereunder…but at least in that old style, it was visually self-explanatory. Here, forgive me for being a dumb ol’ fogy (39 goin’ on 90 here), but I had to puzzle it out in my head!