Unless I’m wrong, that plugin requires users to be externally authenticated, so it doesn’t take into consideration WordPress’ existing accounts.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/http-authentication/ ? (maybe extract what is needed and wrap it around the activity rss feed pages?)
The problem is WordPress doesn’t support HTTP authentication, which is what is used for most password-protected RSS feeds.
Not much you can do at the moment… unless someone else has any other ideas?
*sigh* Not what I wanted to hear. There are ways to password-protect RSS feeds. Anything that could be done in that respect, perhaps?
RSS is probably disabled because the group is private.
If it was made available, anyone could access your private group’s activities!
Though if you’re logged in, it should work fine.
You could hack the groups_action_group_feed() function in /bp-groups.php to make this wide open though.
Or remove this function and create your own.
I think the main point is being missed here. As much as I love them and their work, Andy and jjj can’t do this all by themselves. So guys, I would ask you to wrap your arms around whomever you deem best suited to help you lead this community. We all know who those people are. They are more then capable. But I can tell you from 1st hand knowledge that those very important set of Lieutenants goes very much ignored. Emails go un-responded and forum posts are dying on the vine. THAT’s why the community is floundering. Jeff Sayre, Ray, et all should know what the plan is. They should know why private messaging was turned off. They should know what the vision is for the new bp.org and therefore should be helping steer the community. BUT everyone is left blowing in the wind. So it’s not a matter of “everything is fine” Someone please lead the community. Leadership can even take the form of “I am too busy, , I need you to take charge for me.
@myjive – Please post this as a defect on Trac.
Login with the same credentials as you use here on bp.org.
Note that changes need to occur in the bp_core_catch_no_access() function to be more cooperative with private access pages.
@themightymo The template file that handles this is bp-default/groups/single/home.php. See around line 44 – bp_group_status_message() creates the “to join this group…” message for private groups. If you want to customize the way that you are redirected, you should start here.
It’s strange, though – BP 1.2.4.1 should do what you are suggesting out of the box. Could there be a plugin conflict? Or an issue with a custom theme that you’ve built?
BTW: I am using WordPress MU 2.9.2 and BuddyPress 1.2.4.1
Re: Forum vs. Activity – I have no doubt that it is harder than is seems, but that’s not relevant to the discussion. The issues being discussed are usability. Any good and usable design begins and ends with users… not programmers.
Re: Autocomplete (my pet peeve) – Sorry, doesn’t make sense to me. I’m free to message any member I want but I’m only given help and feedback when typing in friends names. Huh? If I compose a message to a non-friend by putting their username in “Send to” – I have no indication that I’ve gotten it right until after clicking send. And even then, the feedback is not that clear. An error message could be a wrong username or something else. I know you can more easily message non-friends by visiting their profile (instead of having to remember their username and type it without error) and clicking “Send Private Message”… but that only allows for one recipient. As for the spam issue – that’s a technical issue. We’re talking about usability.
And yes… I have tried to create a plugin and I got 99% there – but I’m not a programmer and I got stuck on how to remove / override the existing autocomplete ajax functions. I asked for help here but didn’t get a response. So I had to hack the core 
Oh well. And for some reason it stopped working the other day. Odd.
Anyway, BuddyPress just seems a little confused when it comes to it’s ideas around Friends, Followers and Members. It feels like an odd mix of Twitter (wide open) and Facebook (walled off).
BuddyPress really seems to be slowing down when following its TRAC and I have followed it for more than a year now. The only thing I am seeing are Andys updates on his Twitter-page talking about soccer and his iPad. For my understanding, this is an indication that BP is (slowly) dying.
There are only a few major features which need to be developed in the BP-Core-Code in order to make BuddyPress a proper Social-Networking-software:
– Privacy features
– Properly working Private-Groups (I do have a TRAC-ticket out there regarding this)
– Blog-Posts from the Front-End
And most of all: BuddyPress needs to be made much simpler in terms of User-Interface (Navigation & Activity-streams).
Less is More !
KISS (Keep It Simple & Stupid)
I do agree with you Peter. The BuddyPress.org website has become so complicated, I am actually very confused when using it. It was much simpler before with the old design. Also I do not understand why Private-Messages have disappeared ? The “Followers” and “Following”-stuff is quite complicated as well and not thought through at all.
Anyway, for my website I am going to strip-out the Forums-component, as both Forums and Activity make it quite confusing for my users.
I am actually quite disappointed of BuddyPress due to the promised but missing features e.g. “Privacy”, “Properly Working Private-Groups” and “Blog-Posts from the Front-End” and am thinking of using another software than BP. Also feedback and information from the Core-developers on the status of implementation of those features is lacking considerably.
Once again: KISS (Keep It Simple & Stupid)
I have the same thing happening in 3.0 RC3.
I think a trac bug is already filed for this – when you reply to a private message for some reason the notification is updated again.
Try adding the following in wp-config.php:
define( 'BP_ENABLE_USERNAME_COMPATIBILITY_MODE', true );
This should fix your problem.
A little further explanation: I am setting this site up for my family. I did not want to create a public forum, mainly because I don’t want our family discussions publicly viewable. So I had set my original group up as private. Since I did not have a public group, I was unable to post anything from the “Forums” tab (Group Forums Directory) since private groups are not shown in the drop-down menu there. This is where the confusion arose and why I started this topic. It was not until we set up a public group that we figured out that it was set up this way on purpose. So since our site will not have any public groups, I have disabled bbPress Forums from the BuddyPress Component Setup in the WordPress Dashboard.
We actually have three groups… one public and two private (two of them set up for testing purposes). The “test group” there now is public. The private groups are not showing up in the drop-down menu when you go to post a new topic in the Group Forums Directory at the “Forums” tab. We found this previously submitted ticket (Ticket #2072) about this issue:
https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/2072
I’m not doing anything wrong, it turns out. This is just the way BP is designed. You’d think if you were signed in, and you belonged to a private group, that they would let you have access to that group when posting from the Group Forums Directory! This should not be considered an “enhancement” at all. It’s just poorly designed and illogical… Go figure.
it seems you only have one group setup (which is private) so is the forum enabled for that group?
You could probably hook into the get_header action, do your conditional check and if the person is a mentor, then show the page, otherwise show the registration page or whatever.
Modify the function listed in this thread:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/how-to-make-a-private-community/?topic_page=2&num=15#post-44616
Hopefully it gives you a few pointers.
Travel Junkie – The first code was great on WP 3.0. Thank you!
@wordpresschina, it’s still working fine for me. I’m using a single WP not WPMU, dunno if that makes a deference or not.
You should check your server Error Log to see what is going wrong for you. If I get time a might make a plugin that handles everything… but I’m a bit busy at the moment – and there is a World Cup on ^ ^
Ok, we have found the problem and fixed it. We were using the wp-cache plugin. First we disabled it, but nothing changed. Then we found it had left an objet-cache.php file at the root folder. We deleted it and TADA! In a second all our problems vanished…
@pcwriter hmm yeah I guess I could make a new status type… I know in a future release of buddypress though there is one more status type which is in between public and private like we need here… I’ll check it out on the trac…. that only problem is I’d like a quick solution with no core hacks so I can just get the plugin released and then if people want I could show them how to hack the core to do something like this…
@firetag
So, you’re looking for a “crossover” between private and public groups. Private so the activity doesn’t show in the stream (but it does show in the group) yet public so folks don’t need to be invited to join.
This might help: on lines 71 to 101 is the function/action for groups_setup_globals. On line 97 is the valid_status array (public, private, hidden) where I’m thinking you could add a new status like “category”. As that new status would not be “public”, activity shouldn’t show up in the main stream, and as it wouldn’t be “private” either, neither invitations nor membership requests would be needed.
What do you think…doable?
EDIT: I guess you would need a way to keep that option out of the preselects available to users at the group creation stage though. Hmmm…
