BuddyPress.org

Hi Paul,
In the Buddypress Codex there is information last updated 2 years ago by Sarah Gooding that recommends the two above points that I mentioned for caching. Is this information out of date?
Also the codex points to a support thread:

https://buddypress.org/support/topic/configuring-w3-total-cache-with-buddypress/

This support thread is also a couple of years old and ends with no solution or resolution to BP caching and a lot of frustrated people.

Is it safe to say that the caching plugins do not provide a good solution for Buddypress? And that a server side caching solution is the best option?

I am self hosted on a VPN so for me this is not good news.

It’s blog posts to stream isn’t it, tracks your sites posts.

I can now confirm that there are problems between the integration of bbPress 2.4 and buddypress 1.81.
It turns out that there’s a bug in bbPress 2.4 that does not allow the admin to make a Forum ‘private’ or ‘hidden’. At the moment, the only workaround is to use the bulk edit facility to apply the ‘private’ setting to a forum (but, not, sadly the ‘hidden’ attribute as of yet).
In other words, if you go into the forum setting for the individual forum on the back-end and change the attribute there, it won’t stick. The forum comes back again as ‘Public’.
I used the build editor to change my forum to ‘Private’ and that stopped the replies to topic posts from being broadcast to everyone in the buddypress sitewide activity page. Now, I’m waiting for the ability to make the forums ‘hidden’ for extra security. In the meantime, I’ve been using s2member to lock down the content of the bbPress Group forum. This ONLY works for Group forums, because their topics have a forum-specific URI structure (so URI-restrictions can be used; e.g. ‘/group/<name of group>/forum/’)… whereas non-Group forums just have the ‘/topic/’ URI which is sitewide and cannot be restricted by a particular forum name. This is lamentable, as bbPress is very hard to lock-down otherwise.
It’s taken me many hours to track down all of these niggly problems, which is frustrating, since bbPress and buddypress are meant to be integrated now. So, it seems as if the integration is mucky.
Given all the user confusion regarding forum attributes in bbPress and forum security in buddypress, I would really love to see the development teams come up with a simple, unified interface for managing memberships and access restrictions. Otherwise, we’ll all end up chasing settings in different places, without really understanding their interplay.

This is definitely part of the problem that I’m having. It turns out that there’s a bug in bbPress 2.4 that does not allow the admin to make a Forum ‘private’ or ‘hidden’. At the moment, the only workaround is to use the bulk edit facility to apply the ‘private’ setting to a forum (but, not, sadly the ‘hidden’ attribute as of yet).
In other words, if you go into the forum setting for the individual forum on the back-end and change the attribute there, it won’t stick. The forum comes back again as ‘Public’.
I used the build editor to change my forum to ‘Private’ and that stopped the replies to topic posts from being broadcast to everyone in the buddypress sitewide activity page. Now, I’m waiting for the ability to make the forums ‘hidden’ for extra security. In the meantime, I’ve been using s2member to lock down the content of the bbPress Group forum. This ONLY works for Group forums, because their topics have a forum-specific URI structure (so URI-restrictions can be used; e.g. ‘/group/<name of group>/forum/’)… whereas non-Group forums just have the ‘/topic/’ URI which is sitewide and cannot be restricted by a particular forum name. This is lamentable, as bbPress is very hard to lock-down otherwise.
It’s taken me many hours to track down all of these niggly problems, which is frustrating, since bbPress and buddypress are meant to be integrated now. So, it seems as if the integration is mucky.
Given all the user confusion regarding forum attributes in bbPress and forum security in buddypress, I would really love to see the development teams come up with a simple, unified interface for managing memberships and access restrictions. Otherwise, we’ll all end up chasing settings in different places, without really understanding their interplay.

I tried running the Tools > Forums but it only solved the problem of new topic posts, but not replies to those posts. Here’s my rundown of the situation:
I think the problem has to do with buddypress – bbPress integration.
The bbPress Group Forums appear to be set to ‘Open’ by default, even if they are hidden within buddypress. In fact, I cannot alter this. I tried changing my secret forum to ‘hidden’ within bbPress (2.4) and it won’t save the change – it always comes back as ‘open’.
Therefore, it’s up to buddypress to manage the privacy of the forum. It seems to be doing this with new topic posts (I can confirm that hide_sitewide in the activity stream table is “1” for new posts). The problem is that if someone replies to that post, the hide_sitewide for that reply is set to “0”, even though it’s inside of a ‘hidden’ group forum. To me, this is a serious security breach, as it exposes the forum name, the original topic name, and the contents of the reply in EVERYONE’s Activity stream, whether they are logged in or not, a member of the hidden forum or not.

Actually, this problem is not resolved and appears to be pretty bad. Here’s my rundown:

I think the problem has to do with buddypress – bbPress integration.
The bbPress Group Forums appear to be set to ‘Open’ by default, even if they are hidden within buddypress. In fact, I cannot alter this. I tried changing my secret forum to ‘hidden’ within bbPress (2.4) and it won’t save the change – it always comes back as ‘open’.
Therefore, it’s up to buddypress to manage the privacy of the forum. It seems to be doing this with new topic posts (I can confirm that hide_sitewide in the activity stream table is “1” for new posts). The problem is that if someone replies to that post, the hide_sitewide for that reply is set to “0”, even though it’s inside of a ‘hidden’ group forum. To me, this is a serious security breach, as it exposes the forum name, the original topic name, and the contents of the reply in EVERYONE’s Activity stream, whether they are logged in or not, a member of the hidden forum or not.

I think the problem has to do with buddypress – bbPress integration.
The bbPress Group Forums appear to be set to ‘Open’ by default, even if they are hidden within buddypress. In fact, I cannot alter this. I tried changing my secret forum to ‘hidden’ within bbPress (2.4) and it won’t save the change – it always comes back as ‘open’.
Therefore, it’s up to buddypress to manage the privacy of the forum. It seems to be doing this with new topic posts (I can confirm that hide_sitewide in the activity stream table is “1” for new posts). The problem is that if someone replies to that post, the hide_sitewide for that reply is set to “0”, even though it’s inside of a ‘hidden’ group forum. To me, this is a serious security breach, as it exposes the forum name, the original topic name, and the contents of the reply in EVERYONE’s Activity stream, whether they are logged in or not, a member of the hidden forum or not.

@bp-help
I don’t think you have to explain someone why you do or don’t do things. As Buddypress is Open Source and as long as people do things for free, I’ll appreciate their work. I don’t think that the guy who developed a paid version of the plugin you do for free has to starve or die because of your work – maybe he has to think about some more advanced functions – so, I would be glad to get a free version of your plugin!

Greetings,
noizeburger

hi @ananwebman,

accordingly to what brajesh wrote here 2 weeks ago, his plugin works with bp 1.8 ! So, it doesn’t work should be defined much better, or should be discussed directly with the author.

Despite what you write

this is required to approve accounts and discourage users posting incorrect images

the answer is yes and no.

A signup is approved as soon as the subscriber send back the validdation key received by email.
Now his account exist and is active, ok ?

But if you allow any upload during the subscription process, it’s as like you allow a unknow user to upload a unknow document on your server. What about this uploaded picture if you decide to ban or delete that user ?

This is against any security policy, don’t you think so ?

It’s best practice to not allow anything to a user before his account is approved by the site admin and evtl. some security plugins.

@jakewho

Prevent spaces in WordPress/BuddyPress Usernames

@squeebo
Its kinda hard to compare when one doesn’t even know what WPeddit is. I seriously doubt whatever WPeddit is would be on the same level as BP as it has been in development for 5-6 years.

I have a feeling you are trying to do something that is practically already there.
Every profile has a unique link. Here is the link for your profile:
https://buddypress.org/community/members/tripvips/
You can give this link to anyone who wants to view the profile. Here “give the link” means anything you can think of: post on Facebook, post in forums, post in forum signatures, attach this link to profiles on 3rd party websites (when you post comments for instance).
If needed, you can create a banner type images for posting anywhere with the link “under” image leading to the person’s profile.

The above is basics and if you want to have different “codes” leading to the same profile, you simply need to look into things like URL cloaking/redirecting/shortening/tracking. Using these, you can have differently looking URLs, all leading to desired profile’s URL.

Did I not fully got your question, or are you trying to make things a lot more complicated than they are?

Regards

Don’t thank me yet! You might be hating me in a few days:
https://buddypress.org/support/topic/how-to-get-the-profile-field-name-and-its-value-in-the-members-loop/
I plan on releasing it on the WP repository!

Why! Is this deliberate confrontation? Generally speaking one wouldn’t do this or at least only do this if one didn’t give a hang about what people thought about you.

@shanebp
Don’t thank me yet! You might be hating me in a few days:
https://buddypress.org/support/topic/how-to-get-the-profile-field-name-and-its-value-in-the-members-loop/
I plan on releasing it on the WP repository!

1. members are searched by profile fields
2. you can create unlimited profile fields
3. there may be an events plugin
4. BP has invite only private groups
5. there was a geo plugin, not sure its up to date
6. members are unlimited

hi @caycee !

consider what djpaul answered here:
https://buddypress.org/support/topic/wesley-daniel-chain-problem-in-buddypress/#post-171672

and on the plugin page
Requires: WordPress 3.2, BuddyPress 1.5 or higher
Compatible up to: WordPress 3.5 / BuddyPress 1.6
Last Updated: 2012-10-9

@bloxblox
Its really not good to reply on 2 year old threads. Anyway there is a plugin for that and from what I can see it still works decent even though it has not been updated in a few years.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-edit-activity-stream/

@modemlooper
“Neither Facebook, Twitter or Google+ allow yo to edit activity/ status updates. Seems like it’s the normal on the interwebs.”

Facebook does let you edit now.

Even if they didn’t, is that a good reason to not allow it on buddypress? Facebook do lots of things that don’t follow the “golden rule”.

@squaredindex If you’re using a WordPress theme, not a BP Default child theme, check out BP Theme Compatibility information at
a. https://codex.buddypress.org/theme-development/theme-compatibility-1-7/a-quick-look-at-1-7-theme-compatibility/
b. https://codex.buddypress.org/theme-development/theme-compatibility-1-7/template-hierarchy/

Basically if you want to change ALL the BP pages to have a sidebar or not, then create a new file named buddypress.php and paste in the code of your theme’s file which has a sidebar or a full width layout. Then upload buddypress.php to the root of your theme’s folder in server. For theme compatibility to work, your theme should have the_title and the_content within the WP loop. Read a) above.

If you want to mix-and-match BP pages with full-width and two-column (with sidebar) layouts, read b).