BuddyPress.org

Thanks, Hugo. But, is there a way to disable commenting on the Activity Streams without knowing code? That is exactly what I want to do.

If not, can you point me somewhere where there is info on how to do it? There is just too much info to dig through.

The only thing that I have found is in BuddyPress>Settings where it says:
Blog & Forum Comments Allow activity stream commenting on blog and forum posts

I unchecked the box and the Reply option still shows on the Activity Streams page and on the Group Home pages.

I worked with FrontPage for years, then with DreamWeaver and have navigated around on many different types of platforms. I do understand a bit of code and I do understand all of the work that goes into all of this. But, I don’t have the confidence to mess with the files and with the constant updates from WordPress, plugins, and theme, I would much prefer to work with settings than to mess with things that might later conflict with future updates, etc. I did a lot of reading and looked at many options before choosing to go with BuddyPress, but I had no idea that it would be so hard. I set up WordPress sites for other people and am a good tweaker, so it’s not like I am totally green. But, there are some major flaws as can be seen by all of the distressed people flooding the forums here and on bbPress.

When I started up in January, everything was a mess with the new updates. The theme I had bought took several months to work out their incompatibilities, various plugins were going through revisions, etc. Now, finally, almost everything seems to work, but our members are totally confused and I just want to make it as simple as possible for them.

So, when you say, “Commenting on items in the activity stream such as forum entries has always had issues and the advice and best practise generally has been to disable commenting on such items in the activity stream in order to avoid this confusion.”, then, yes. I do expect that issues that come up regularly for you developers should be addressed and fixed, especially when it can cause so much confusion for the end users. If it’s an inherent problem, then we should have a button in the settings area where we can turn off that problem.

I also provide loads of free technical assistance to my people, so I do appreciate what all of you do. I believe in the WordPress model, encourage other people to use it, and now have had these months to try to learn BuddyPress. Would I recommend it to other groups and organizations? Not unless they have the money to hire their own code people (which I don’t). Are there better options out there? I ran a Ning group for a couple of years and it did what I want this forum to do: groups with topical discussions. But, I hated how it looked, found it clunky and wanted the freedom that BuddyPress offers in adding on WordPress pages. I tried several other platforms, too. All were a mess. There are some very nice cloud options but they are expensive and I’m doing the “starving artist” routine, so it’s not fun. So, I think BuddyPress has the potential to be the top model, but it’s not there yet, at least not “out of the box”. IMHO

Anyway, if there is a fix for this, please point me the way and I’ll try to make it happen. Thank you.