BuddyPress.org

Hi @plumbingsuperstore – Oof, sorry to hear about the problems, but glad your hosting provider had a way to roll back.

BuddyPress doesn’t touch user credentials, so it’s highly unlikely that BuddyPress itself would be the cause of your admin creds not working after BP was installed. I’m guessing that either there’s some user error here, or there’s another plugin interfering with the process. To reiterate, logging into WP should be exactly the same before or after the activation of BP.

Regarding the 404 error when activating your account: When you install BuddyPress, it should create pages called Register and Activate. It sounds like this worked for Register (since you were able to register a new account), but didn’t for Activate. If you try this again, take careful note of the URLs you see in your browser when registering, the URL that appears in the activation email, and the URL you see in the browser after clicking the activation link. There could be a clue here.

One final tip: You can stay logged in as an admin in your browser and still test as another user. Open a private browsing window: Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/private-browsing-use-firefox-without-history, Chrome https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en, Safari https://www.macworld.com/article/1133941/software-web/safariprivate.html

Hi @aubreyw – The email should show up immediately. If it’s not, the places you should check are:

1. Is any email being sent from your server? For example, do BP emails (like private message notifications) show up? How about other WP notifications, like a password reset?

2. Check your spam folders (which it sounds like you’ve already done)

It’s possible to manually trigger the activation of a changed email address, but it sounds like the more fundamental problem here is that emails aren’t working properly, so it seems better to try to address that problem first.

I am having the same problem with my web site, and I have figured out why the problem happens, and why the problem is intermittent…

Here is the problem: a user registers for a BuddyPress account, receives the activation email, follows the link in the activation email, and gets the “Invalid activation key” error. Yet, their account really *is* activated, and they can log in and use their account. A different user does exactly the same thing, and everything works great for them – they get the “Account Successfully Activated” page.

*Some* users have this problem, most don’t. The ones that do? They seem to have “Blue Coat K-9 Web Protection” software installed on their computers. This is software that is generally installed by parents to keep children from viewing inappropriate content on the internet. When the user follows the “activation” link, K-9 (running on the user’s computer) sends the URL to Blue Coat’s servers, which hit the URL (causing the account activation to succeed). Blue Coat’s servers analyse the “account activation succeeded” response, decides that web page is “kid friendly”, and then tells the user’s computer that that URL is “safe”. The user’s browser is then allowed to hit the URL, but, since that BuddyPress account has already been activated (by Blue Coat’s servers), the user sees the “Invalid activation key” error message, because we tried to activate the BuddyPress account twice.

Assuming that Blue Coat’s K-9 software is not the only “internet safety” software that acts in this way, it might be a good idea to change the BuddyPress “account activation” system to display an “activation succeeded” message when a user (or their “internet safety” software) tries to activate a BuddyPress account more than once.

Here are more details, in case if anybody is interested…

I instrumented my site’s “index.php” and my site’s “public_html\wp-content\plugins\buddypress\bp-templates\bp-legacy\buddypress\members\activate.php” with code that logs tons of stuff, including the IP address of the user. This led to the following discovery…

When a non-K-9 user follows the “activation” link, “index.php” gets hit (from their computer’s IP address), which invokes the fore-mentioned “activate.php”, which activates the account and emits the “activation successful” web page, and all is well. One web request happened, as demonstrated by “$_SERVER[‘UNIQUE_ID’]”.

When a K-9 user follows the “activation” URL, however, a MUCH different situation occurs, which involves four separate web requests. The first two requests come from an IP address that is registered to Blue Coat Systems / Symantec Corporation, the makers of the K-9 Internet Protection software. The second two requests come from the user’s computer…

* Web request #1 – Blue Coat’s computer hits “index.php” with the activation URL’s ending slash missing.

* Web request #2 – Blue Coat’s computer hits “index.php” again, with the correct activation URL this time. This invokes lots of PHP code (on my server), which eventually results in “activate.php” running and the account activation succeeding. The reply (the “account activation succeeded” web page) is delivered to Blue Coat’s servers, who analyses it and decide that the web page is “kid friendly”, so it tells K-9 (running on the user’s computer) that it’s OK to show that page.

* Web request #3 – The user’s computer finally hits “index.php”, in order to activate the account.

* Web request #4 – The user’s computer hits “index.php” again, with the registration key removed from the end of the URL this time. This invokes lots of misc PHP code, which eventually results in “activate.php” running and failing this time, because the activation has already happened (back in web request #2, which Blue Coat made, in order to determine if that web page is “kid friendly” or not).

I have no idea why the user’s computer (in #3 and #4) make two requests instead of one. However, even if it made just one, it would still show the error message, because that’s the second time the BuddyPress account was activated.

– kcscience

You can trigger an activation email manually:

bp_core_signup_send_validation_email( $user_id, $user_email, $activation_key );

You will need to get $user_id, $user_email and $activation_key before hand.

Hi @arbolife any chance you even vaguely remember what you did to get new user activation email being sent out when using WPML + BuddyPress? Like you, everything works 100% correctly on the ‘English’ side when new users register, requests membership for a private BP group, logs-in, etc – BUT if a user registers on the french registration page (fr/register/) they never get any emails (I they are foever listed as “pending” in the user area). I’ve also noticed that no emails (outgoing) get triggered if an existing user switches to the /fr/ side & tries to join a private BuddyPress group. Trying to access the /fr/wp-login.php page (or the password reset) from the /fr/ side will also trigger a 404 page. So, like you mentioned, it’s a setting “somewhere” in WPML to resolve these (many) anomalies, but for whatever reason, I can’t see to find the resolution!

My test setup:

WP: 3.7.4
BP: 2.8.2
WPML: 3.7.0
BuddyPress WPML Plugin: 1.5.5.1

-Jeff

You should use HTTPS throughout your site if you want to force the email to use SSL links.

Or force HTTPS on individual pages like the registration page so activation email links will use SSL.

The other alternative is filtering the email tokens to use HTTPS:
https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/2.8.2/src/bp-core/bp-core-functions.php#L3120

If you’re a WordPress developer, hook on to the 'bp_after_send_email_parse_args' filter and do checks against the 'tokens' array key.

For more info on the 'bp_after_X_parse_args' filter, see:
https://codex.buddypress.org/developer/using-bp_parse_args-to-filter-buddypress-template-loops/

Did you tested without any additionnal mail plugin ?
Have you found this topic ?

Hi, I’m having the activation email issue as well. I’m running exactly the same install as I was on a another site 2 weeks ago (before upgrading to WP 4.72) that worked fine. This one I can’t even send messages manually. I’m a plug and play person; no coding skills. If these things don’t work, I don’t know where to begin. Guidance is appreciated.
WP 4.72
WP default 2017 theme
all plugins disabled except BP

There are some plugins, do a google search.

you can also use this code but you will get spam if they can get in without email conformation.

add_filter( 'bp_registration_needs_activation', '__return_false' );

Have you tried asking on the WordPress forums? the activation email is a feature inherited from their so they might have an idea

I think one of your plugins must be stopping the activation emails from going out. I’d deactivate them until the one that is blocking them is found.

If they are known to you then you can set them up in the way that you suggested, if you choose not to send them and email, that will prevent the activation mail going out and they will be free to login, you will have to tell them their password though.

To those that have not activated their accounts you can view them in the Dashboard>>Users>>All Users views, their one view called Pending, it’s in here you will find unactivated users.

You could always turn registration on, for them, let them see a new users view of getting set up on the site.

I’m trying to put together a guide to setting up social networks with BuddyPress, you might like to give it a look, it’s here: It’s spread over multiple chapters that you can access via the “Installing BuddyPress” menu.

It’s nothing official, just information on what I’ve discovered over the past couple of years so it’s pretty current.

There are a few ways to do this, and it depends a bit on why you want to do it. If you are in development, and just want to ensure that no users get emails while you’re working on stuff, I highly recommend Postman SMTP. You can configure it so that all emails get logged, but not actually sent. It’s very useful for troubleshooting and for protecting your users from accidental mail. But with the ability to still see what “would be” sent, if you were live.

If you have a different goal — like just eliminating the sign up or activation emails, that’s a different thing. If you post up a bit more detail, I’m sure you’ll get the info you need. 🙂

After a new user register, they are sent an activation email, they can click on this or copy the key and paste it into the activation page