BuddyPress.org

i’ve made some progress by installing the community blogs plugin.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-community-blogs/

the user’s roles in blog 1 are still removed when they create their own blog, but the plugin corrects this behaviour as soon as the page is reloaded.

this is definitely not a perfect solution but it’s all i can do.

i still have one problem, though. this plugin will not allow me to specify ‘subscriber’ – only ‘contributor’. i tried fiddling with the code and couldn’t get this to work. if anyone could help me hack this together, i would really appreciate it.