BuddyPress.org

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

“Spam!!!”
*sees the topic is about his own theme*
“Absolutely NO problem with this!”

Thanks for creating this topic Ross, I’m really glad you like the theme I’m putting up for sale. And Boone thanks for promoting my already outdated video as well My intention with the new BP-Tricks site is not to only sell a premium theme, and offer some kind of subscription service (I’m not a big fan of subscription models for Themes).

BP-Tricks will hopefully become a resource for great BuddyPress tips and tricks. Selling the theme is just a great way for me to keep BP-Tricks running, earn some money and hopefully improve the quality of BuddyPress Child Themes.. The theme is GPL and cool stuff that I add to it will all be shared in the form of Tutorials on BP-Tricks. The actual design elements and the support are what people are paying for (similar as WooThemes does this for example).

Everyone can submit code/design/inspirational Tricks through a form or the backend, and by doing so you’ll earn Awards ( @DJPaul his Achievement Plugin FTW!) and badges awarded by me. The best new trick each month earns a nice price (currently a Free theme, but I’ll try to get some sponsors) and they get listed on the frontpage in Widget of Fame

Besides that the Activity Stream is purely meant to be a source of information displaying ONLY new Tricks, external Tricks (BP-Links from @MrMaz) and external member blogs from our members (if you blog about BuddyPress or anything related to it) you can add your RSS feed to your profile and people who follow you get your updates in their stream. This plugin will be released to the community when the site launches next week.

There’s also a customized search feature which only searches the BuddyPress network (BP.org, BP-Tricks, WPMU.org, Etivite.com, BuddyDev.com, ShabuShabu.eu etc) and a bunch of other stuff which I probably forgot to tell.

All the site features remain free, and also the site will be Ad free for as long as I earn enough to keep it running without loosing money on it.

I hope this makes my intentions clear, and that it will become a place where you can enjoy great BP Tricks from not only me, but from anyone, without getting the feeling that I’m out for someone’s money.. because that is certainly not my intention If you want to have access to the site before launch to look around and submit some Tricks for the community just let me know, and I’ll make sure you’ll have access and be a part of the cool kids

@psycolor –

where to make changes, really depends on your theme setup.

If you want a theme similar to the default, but with your own enhancements (such as the ones in this thread), you are best to create a child theme, and make the changes in there. You’ll be editing the activity-loop.php and entry.php files in your child theme.

Have a look in the documentation for the article on creating child themes.

I don’t know whether there are many examples on line of alternative activity loops. I posted one example earlier today of some amends we’d done to entry.php to access and enhance the activity template tags: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/requests-feedback/forum/topic/omit-time-stamps-from-activityfeed-so-only-date-stamps-show

And here’s an example of how we do a custom blog loop from a site I’m working on at the moment:

`
<?php $args = array (
‘action’ => ‘new_blog_post’,
‘max’ => 20); ?>

<?php $count=0;
while (bp_activities() && ($count < ) : bp_the_activity(); ?>

<?php $blog_id = bp_get_activity_item_id();

if ((int)$blog_id == 1) continue; ?>

<li class="<?php if ($count “>

`

@pjnu

looking at the filter suggested by @hnla – It looks like you could make that work as well. Rather than setting the content to ” “, you would set it to the date submitted (which I think you are still wanting to display).

“nice plugin, only issue I see is that it tweets the URL of the page you are on rather than the item.”

@modemlooper This would work nice for a tweeting a group though ( and adding “facebook Recommend” ) so that all the ‘feed things/social stuff pertaining to the group’ are in a similar place.

Im trying to get the tweet button to be between the rss feed class and the activity-filter-select div, as in the image ( using add_action('bp_before_group_body', 'bp_tweet_button_activity_filter'); ) its inserting it above the subnav div, ( needs to be inside subnav.. ) but I can figure out how to get it between the two. Once I can position it correctly I’ll add the Facebook one too. Maybe can be a seperate, spin-off of your plug-in?

Maybe if someone knows where to find the subnav ( for groups ) code I can have a look and get it sorted.

Edit: Iv’e created a topic not to hi-jack the thread: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/creating-extending/forum/topic/inside-group-subnav/

@amahesh –

In your theme’s functions.php, make sure your code looks something like this:
http://pastebin.com/Pn1jFXG5

Read the comments in the code.

Then In your duplicate of bp-activity-group-feed.php, you need to change:

if ( bp_has_activities( 'object=' . $bp->groups->id . '&primary_id=' . $bp->groups->current_group->id . '&max=50&display_comments=threaded' ) ) :

to

if ( bp_has_activities( 'object=' . $bp->groups->id . '&primary_id=' . $bp->groups->current_group->id . '&secondary_item_id=' . $bp->groups->current_group->creator_id . 'max=50&display_comments=threaded' ) ) :

This will filter the group activity feed so only updates from the creator of the group will be listed. If you have multiple admins, you’ll have to find a way to append their IDs (comma-delimited) to the end of the “secondary_item_id” parameter.

@Boonebgorges

I’ve spent a few hours playing around with BP based on info in this thread but am having some trouble. Does anyone know how to make it so that only updates from the group admin appear in the “Activity” feed?

Thanks

Ok, spending evern more time on this… I went back to the idea of using @r-a-y ‘s modified regestered-users-only-plugin… Now it is 95% the way I want except the homepage is not re-directing to the landing page… every other page does this…. probably has something to do with the home page being the activity stream??? I’m copying the key changes I have done to the plugin below:

// This is a base array of pages that will be EXCLUDED from being blocked

if ($bp&&($bp->current_component == BP_REGISTER_SLUG ))//buddypress
return;

if ( bp_is_register_page() || bp_is_activation_page() || is_feed() ||is_page(‘landing’) ) //buddypress)
return;

$this->exclusions = array(
‘wp-login.php’,
‘wp-signup.php’,
‘wp-register.php’,
‘wp-activate.php’,
‘wp-cron.php’, // Just incase
‘wp-trackback.php’,
‘wp-app.php’,
‘xmlrpc.php’,
);

// If the current script name is in the exclusion list, abort
if ( in_array( basename($_SERVER), apply_filters( ‘registered-users-only_exclusions’, $this->exclusions) ) ) return;

// Still here? Okay, then redirect to the login form
bp_core_redirect( ‘http://musicpln.org/pln-posts/landing/&#8217; );