BuddyPress.org

Re: Forum vs. Activity – I have no doubt that it is harder than is seems, but that’s not relevant to the discussion. The issues being discussed are usability. Any good and usable design begins and ends with users… not programmers.

Re: Autocomplete (my pet peeve) – Sorry, doesn’t make sense to me. I’m free to message any member I want but I’m only given help and feedback when typing in friends names. Huh? If I compose a message to a non-friend by putting their username in “Send to” – I have no indication that I’ve gotten it right until after clicking send. And even then, the feedback is not that clear. An error message could be a wrong username or something else. I know you can more easily message non-friends by visiting their profile (instead of having to remember their username and type it without error) and clicking “Send Private Message”… but that only allows for one recipient. As for the spam issue – that’s a technical issue. We’re talking about usability.

And yes… I have tried to create a plugin and I got 99% there – but I’m not a programmer and I got stuck on how to remove / override the existing autocomplete ajax functions. I asked for help here but didn’t get a response. So I had to hack the core Oh well. And for some reason it stopped working the other day. Odd.

Anyway, BuddyPress just seems a little confused when it comes to it’s ideas around Friends, Followers and Members. It feels like an odd mix of Twitter (wide open) and Facebook (walled off).