[peterverkooijen]

“Personally, I see nothing wrong with a social network which allows unregistered users to comment with CAPTCHA …”

I’m sorry, but the whole point of a social network is that it is not anonymous. You can’t have unregistered users on a social network. The point of a social network is to allow members to interact with eachother in a trusted environment like they would in the offline world; you introduce yourself, it has your picture and some basic personal information, you can make friends, etc. Mixing in anonymous “users” destroys that purpose.

Anonymous comments are fine on a forum, which is about topics. I go to forum to find answers to PHP questions; I don’t care who posts a coding solution.

“I really like the idea of them all being mixed together, if nothing else just to see what can be done, breaking down boundaries …”

Sure there will be many use cases where you would like to mix social network with a forum, with Twitter-like microblogging, with event management, with galleries, etc. But why cram everything into Buddypress?

I needed a simple, flexible social networking script with a solid reliable core that I could combine with other PHP scripts for whatever else I might need. Since bbpress forums started taking over Buddypress has become useless to me.