BuddyPress.org

My Questions:
1. Has anyone experienced a similar issue?
> probably, with 2,208,785 downloads !

2. Does it appear to be a bug or am I mis-interpreting a functionality?
> probably 2 nd option

3. Any workarounds?
> next tree 3 steps back, enter the forest and run 500 yards and check under the oak.

When a group is setup, you choose to make it public, private or hidden. Depending on this status, the activity will be shown or not. Details of this are explained on the group creation page.

• For a public group, all activities are public. Group is listed on group directory.
• For a private group, all activities are private and only be visible to members of the group. Group is listed on group directory.
• For a hidden group, any thing is masked except for the group members. Group is not listed on group directory.

If you create a private group the 3 of may 2014, his activities are registered to the bp-activities tab from this date with a status of “private”.

The 17 august 2014 you decide to modify the group status from private to public.
From now on, the group is considered as public and any activity generated in the group after this date will be considered as public.

In a few words, private activities are/and stay always private and public activities are always public, independantly of the group status.
And the activity feeds don’t look back in the past.

Hope to be clear. 😉

– Can you see the groups in question in the Dashboard? Dashboard > Groups
Yes I can

– Are you logged in as an administrator or a normal user?
Administrator

– Is the logged-in user a member of the groups in question?
Yes I am

– Can you see the groups when you go to example.com/members/yourmembername/groups?
No

But I can see on my activity feed that I joined the hidden group and can access the group link from there. eg. example.com/groups/hiddengroupname, but that’s the only way I can access it.

Hi @suysal @mileskimberley & @macpresss

We have accomplished a similar task, and what a pain in the ass of a task it was…. We made it so that it’s not possible to see all members posts, you must first be friends with them. We also made ours so that you would only see the feed of groups if you joined the group as well, just like fb and all other mainstream networks, it just makes sense to do it this way, more personalised feed, less junk. Its a detailed code of a few hundred lines that we include in our functions.php file.

We paid for the solution to be custom developed via external teams because it was slightly outside of our inhouse development skillset… If you want to chip in for the code I am more than happy to send it to you. If I coded this myself and it costed me nothing to create I would just paste the code here but it’s not the case in this scenario.

Alternatively (and our preferred option), if Buddypress core developers want to build it into BP and create a setting for it in the core plugin backend to allow this option then I am happy to send it to them for free so that we don’t need to support this custom piece of code through the upgrades (which we have been supporting this custom code for a year now). I know this setting/option is not for everyone using BP but there are many out there who would love this feature included and it could be as simple as a checkbox in the backend saying should users only see friends activity, maybe a second one as well should users only see groups activity they have previously joined. We haven’t built such a setting because we use this by default.

Anyways feel free to drop me a line here or at info@fem-productions.com

Cheers

Aside from this, it’s unfortunately the sort of thing that can only be fixed if it can be reproduced

Yes – i can reproduce this though fully accept that blame probably lies with my customisations either with plugins or functions though these live happily with bp 1.9.2

So i have put this up on an online test site – (slow)
at test site http://ballynagran.isourplace.ie/ – (slow) wp 3.8 bp trunk 8227
login username ben4 password ben4
And i believe i’ve reproduced the errors reported.

Very much appreciate any feedback when time permits.

1) see http://ballynagran.isourplace.ie/members/ben4/friends/requests/ where a friendship request from ben8 has been repeated over 50 times

2) the item-meta in activity “active 3 months ago” is not being updated – login as anne anne or nils nils to reproduce

3) a very recent comment in the blog http://bep.ballyngran.isourplace.ie (at http://bep.ballynagran.isourplace.ie/2013/08/29/solid-fuel-heating-resources/) is not replicated in activity of http://ballyngran.isourplace.ie/activity

If bp 2 beta is replaced by 1.9.2 normal service is returned.

bp 1.9.2 can also be seen on a dot com version of this test site on a different server

Have installed a debug plugin – results can be seen on http://isourplace.ie/wp-content/debug.log

On a local install tried deactivating cat / tag plugin — no change.

@tduschei
That really is not what the unlbocked pages are meant to display. It is not meant for pages that need to generate the unique id of a a logged in user. That would defeat the purpose of the plugin. You can allow logged out visitors to view the members though by entering: members
in one of the unblocked page fields. I hope you understand that is the logic behind the plugin. It would not make sense to use a plugin for privacy only to divulge the most sensitive content on the site which is users profiles to logged out visitors. Its not a bug, it was developed this way purposely. Good luck!

Sending friend requests to folks you don’t know is an issue that all social networks, be they Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, or even LinkedIn, have to contend with.

That said, I wouldn’t call it the bane of social networking. What really does a purported “spammer” gain by sending friend requests? Annoyance for certain people that they have received a friend request? Unlikely – the text is preset…the spammer cant even include his/her fake links. Also, most folks are now pretty adept at ignoring such messages. And even if somebody accepts the friend request, what does the spammer gain? What does a “friendship” accomplish?

Comments (WP), forums (bbP) and activity feeds do really really need spam protection. I’m not so sure about the necessity for friend requests.

That being said, how do the big boys manage friend requests?
1. LinkedIn: You can only friend people who are 2 degrees away from you OR whose email address you know. Plus, recipients can mark it as spam.
2. Facebook: Members can control whether they want to receive friend requests at all. Plus recipients can mark requests as spam. Finally, temporary & permanent bans – based on proportion of requests marked as spam.

Throttling is neat, cool and easily done – perhaps like bbP, site admin can define the throttling parameters for BP friend requests throttling.

Much more importantly, an Akismet-like solution for activity spam would be nice. I would look for a 2 stage process on the manual “mark as spam” side of things:
1. Member marks another member’s activity as spam (this is really a flag that puts the activity in a basket for admin to see)
2. Admin looks through the basket and marks either as spam (in which case Akismet is notified) or not spam.

Regarding the code on github, yes, that did partially fix it. Now all users can be found via their user id # rather than username.

/members/id #/

The only problem I see so far is that the code didnt update the activity feed. If you click a name for a user in the activity feed it is still trying to locate user the old way but the user icons on the newsfeed are correct and try to take you to user profile with their user id #.

So say for example:

James Gill wrote a new post, Gluten

The name James Gill is still trying to render the /members/username/ but not the /members/user id#/

but the rest of the site except activity feed appears to be working right now. only the icons on the activity feed try to render /members/user id#/

@aces I have used http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/33072/how-to-remove-feeds-from-wordpress-totally but this works only for the WP pages and not for the BP pages.
then i used
function bp_remove_feeds() {
remove_action( ‘bp_actions’, ‘bp_activity_action_sitewide_feed’, 3 );
remove_action( ‘bp_actions’, ‘bp_activity_action_personal_feed’, 3 );
remove_action( ‘bp_actions’, ‘bp_activity_action_friends_feed’, 3 );
remove_action( ‘bp_actions’, ‘bp_activity_action_my_groups_feed’, 3 );
remove_action( ‘bp_actions’, ‘bp_activity_action_mentions_feed’, 3 );
remove_action( ‘bp_actions’, ‘bp_activity_action_favorites_feed’, 3 );
remove_action( ‘groups_action_group_feed’, ‘groups_action_group_feed’, 3 );
}
add_action(‘init’, ‘bp_remove_feeds’);

But still I can see the feeds for the activity page 🙁

Any help will be highy appreciated?

Anyways @aces thanks for responding 🙂

hmmn… it still works for me but only for the activity feed ( excluding the ` lines which weren’t converted to the new bp forum format ). It used to work for members as well.

To disable all feeds I just tried the following from http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/33072/how-to-remove-feeds-from-wordpress-totally
:

/**
* disable feed
*/
function fb_disable_feed() {
wp_die( __('No feed available,please visit our homepage!') );
}
add_action('do_feed', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'fb_disable_feed', 1);


Which worked for me to disable All feeds to everyone. It’s a bit unsubtle but does plug the security hole….

BuddyPress Extended Settings by @modemlooper can change the default. This is an excellent plugin with many useful settings. Get it here:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-extended-settings/
BP FriendPress can filter activity dependent on friendships so basically it has the ability to show only yours and your friends activity like facebooks wall. Just make sure to read the readme.txt. Get it here:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-friendpress/

I just did a quick check and that plugin is only designed to work for the members directory not site wide from what I see. Either that or it’s stopped working on activity, but the notes seem to indicate it’s designed for members directory.

Per user you can set it yourself but I guess you want a solution that forces users to have it displayed one way? If the per user method works though you can under their user settings in the admin.

This thread: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/requests-feedback/forum/topic/fullname-vs-username-vs-first-last-name/?topic_page=1&num=15 has some thoughts on solutions but they are all code and not sure how applicable to the current code base.

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-usernames-only/forum/topic/bp-username-only-plugin-announcements/ however may be another thing to consider.

Each person’s personal activity is on their profile’s activity stream. For instance:

http://testbp.org/members/johnjamesjacoby/

What I think you want to have is a filtered activity to only show people they are friends with – is that the case?

If that is then you want to look to customise the activity loop and a good starting point would be here:

https://codex.buddypress.org/developer-docs/custom-buddypress-loops/the-activity-stream-loop/

@onyx808: would your code work for my situation? I want to display ONLY profile updates (stuff posted to the “What’s new, x?” text area) on my sitewide activity page, but I want members individual feeds to continue to display everything (profile updates, blog posts, joins, etc.)

@oneearth.. Sure I can give you what i have so far. Here it is:

Series: Setting up W3TotalCache with BuddyPress – Part One

W3Total Cache has taken the WordPress world by storm this year. In my opinion it is by far the greatest performance tool for WordPress, and some of it’s features can be used to speed up BuddyPress as well. It has taken me some time to figure out the best settings, and with something as complicated as this, the results may vary. In this (lengty) trick I’m going to take you through the process of setting up W3Total Cache in the following order;

1: About W3 Total Cache and Installation
2: Server setup
2: Setting up the options that play nice with BuddyPress and your hosting setup
3: Using a CDN with MaxCDN
4: Hosting your Theme files and (group)avatars with the CDN
6: A word from the plugin author Frederick Townes
7: Conclusion

As you’ve probably seen, this is quite an extensive guide, and so I decided to split this post into 2 parts.

About W3 Total Cache and Installation

Plugin author Frederick Townes described W3 Total Cache as follows:

The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. Trusted by many popular blogs like: mashable.com, pearsonified.com, noupe.com, webdesignerdepot.com, freelanceswitch.com, briansolis.com, tutsplus.com, yoast.com, css3.info and others — W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

Sounds impressive? Well it is impressive! So let’s install this plugin by going to your plugin browser and searching for W3 Total Cache. When you’ve found it, click on “Install” and that’s all you need to do install it.

Server Setup

Before we start with setting up the plugin, it’s important to tell you something about the general hosting of BuddyPress sites. Depending on the size of your community

Selecting the options that play nice with BuddyPress and your hosting setup

The hardest thing about using W3 Total Cache are the options that you cannot use in combination with BuddyPress. Because of the way that BuddyPress works and meant to be used (as a social networking tool), page caching and database caching causes trouble with the highly dynamic content that is being added to your site. Things like the activity stream will stop to function correctly if you simple enable all these features. I’ve read many times that the plugin “does not work” or “breaks” BuddyPress, but this is simply not the case. It only “breaks” if you try to use it for things that simply are not meant to be used with BuddyPress.

What caching basically does is taking a snaphot of a page at certain time intervals and serving that to the visitor when he visits that page (it’s more complicated then this, but this works to explain it easily). Now this works great if it takes a snapshot of a blogpost, because the content of a blogpost does not change every couple of minutes. But what happens when this concept is applied to your Activity Stream, Profile pages and Groups? You’ll see outdated data on the page, because in the meantime new content like status updates or group updates have been posted by your community. This explains why you can not use these features with BuddyPress.

But not to worry, there are plenty of feature you can use, and thus allow you to drastically speed up your site (just not as much as on a regular old -boring- WordPress site.

Here’s a screenshot of what you can enable:

[screenshot]

Minify:Minification can decrease file size of HTML, CSS, JS and feeds respectively by ~10% on average.

You can enable minification and configure it by visiting the Minify settings in W3TC it’s admin settings. Here’s how I’ve set it up on BP-Tricks:

[screenshot[

Depending on your hosting configuration you can choose which Minify Cache Method you want to use. If you have a dedicated server or VPS server and have something like APC, XCache or eAccelarator installed then use one of those tools. Or else you can just use the Disk method.

If you have a shared server your only option is the disk method.

Object caching: Object caching greatly increases performance for highly dynamic sites (that use the Object Cache API).

This feature so far has proven to work great with BuddyPress, altough it should be used with caution if you’re on a Shared server because sometimes it can actually decrease pageload times on your site. If that stuff happens it might be best to look into a cheap VPS or dedicated server. A little bit of information about the setup being used on BP-Tricks will be given in part two.

Content Delivery Network: Host static files with your content delivery network provider to reduce page load time.

This feature is probably the most useful for us BuddyPress users. In part two there will be a detailed step-by-step guide in setting up your CDN, so serve not only your theme files, but only your avatars, BP-Default Theme files and your essential plugin files!

Browser Cache: Reduce server load and decrease response time by using the cache available in site visitor’s web browser.

Gzip compression of your pages can also help speeding up your load times. Here’s what I have enabled for all sections on the page, and seems to do it’s job perfectly:

Set expires header
Set cache control header
Set entity tag (eTag)
Enable HTTP (gzip) compression
Here’s a screenshot with all my settings:

[screenshot]

To check if gzip compression works, you can go to http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php and check your domain and see Gzip is working.

---

Still working on the rest, this is all pretty general info.. But maybe it does help some of you