BuddyPress.org

I’m seeing the same behavior where only new members are being added to BuddyPress. I don’t think it has anything to do with where things are installed. I don’t think BuddyPress attempts to add “old” WordPress-only users. You’ll also notice that past blog posts and comments, etc. aren’t shown in your BuddyPress activity stream. However, if you go into an “old” blog post and simply hit update, it gets added to the stream.

What we need is a utility that can be run that will load all the existing WP users into BP. I’d also love to see one that will load up the BP activity stream with WP blog posts and comments as well, but that’s probably asking for too much.

I did find a BuddyPress plugin that talks about being able to import users into BP. However, its not what we are looking for. It is designed to import a list of users that you cut-and-paste into a text box on the plugin. I checked the code and it will only work with WPMU and it will also (re)create whatever users you import into WP as well causing duplicates. https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-import-for-buddypress-all-fields/

I’m going to dig around in the BP core to see how it goes about keeping BP and WP users in sync and see how hard it would be to write a program or plugin that would simply trigger BP to add all the existing WP users that aren’t already in BP.