BuddyPress.org

@Peterverkooijen

I don’t believe it is the standard. Facebook and LinkedIn at their core are just name directories so they wouldn’t work without real names, but I can’t think of any other sites that use real names by default. Every forum I’ve ever seen uses “user names,” and so does every other major site I can think of (Twitter, MySpace, Youtube, Digg, Reddit, WordPress, Blogger, Google, Yahoo, etc., etc.). The reason the user/real name issue is so confused with BP is because they have no privacy controls. If BP did it would make perfect sense to use a “fake user name” in public and keep your real name private for friends only.

Working for me in IE8.

Try deleting your temporary internet files. Or try a restart. Sometimes IE is screwy!
Also, IE8’s InPrivate filter could be blocking your images.

Yes but it modifies the xprofile database table so you will want to take care when using it. I believe it’s simply titled “XProfile Privacy”

For those of you that want to directly influence the future of BuddyPress, http://trac.buddypress.org. Make it your friend. Learn it. Love it. Live it. Give it a hug everyday and patch a bug.

The Trac is where you can post code snippets, or giant mega patches of code that you think should be integrated into BuddyPress. You can see the timeline of when people have done what, and see the outstanding bugs that need squashing before we can safely release the next version. The more bugs you fix, the more code you contribute, the more you are directly involved not only in the community, but directly in the future of the platform as a whole.

As incentive to help out, if your goal is to be a developer and make a career out of BuddyPress, consider walking into a meeting with a possible client, and when they ask what your level of involvement is with WordPress or BuddyPress, and you can respond with “I make it,” your chances of securing that client are pretty good. In order to help make BuddyPress, you have to actually help us make it, and you do that via the Trac. I can say this, because that’s how I did it with both WordPress and BuddyPress, and I’m down to help you guys do it too.

There are plenty of people that are highly active in the Trac that aren’t so much so in the forums, and vice versa. Since we moved BuddyPress.org over to 1.2, both Andy and myself have been busy with our own assignments that yes, do involve BuddyPress, but also involve other neat things like the WordPress.com “Like” feature and planning some neat things for a WordCamp.org redesign.

Truth be told, if /anyone/ is concerned about where I am or what I’m doing in regards to BuddyPress or the future of the project, there are at least 10 methods to contact me directly and I am totally happy and not annoyed by anything that has to do with BuddyPress. Drop me a line, let’s chat http://en.gravatar.com/johnjamesjacoby

To answer a few of the questions/comments/statements in this topic: Private Messages are turned off because spam bots have started targeting BuddyPress installations and we were getting hit pretty hard after we upgraded the site. Raise your hand if you got a PM from someone claiming to love you enough to help you with male enhancement. Regarding my absence in the forums, I’ve really just taken on too many clients and haven’t had the time to look backwards at support AND forwards at development at the same time. It won’t always be that way, but it has been lately and I like it about as much as you all seem to too. I love being in the forums and helping people out, and I’m sad I haven’t been able too recently.

Andy is the figure head of BuddyPress and serves as the guiding light of the project similar to how Matt does for WordPress and bbPress, but there is no shortage of capable people in the BuddyPress community that could take this project by the horns and make it their own at any point. I know I’m not Andy, but if I can pretend to be to help anyone when he’s not around, ping me.

Along the lines of what @matt said, I love using @nacin as an example. He stormed into the WordPress Trac and started contributing code and patching bugs. Some were great, and some were rubbish, but he learned as he contributed and within 1 calendar year he has merited his way into being a core committer for WordPress, and contributed something insane; like 60% or more of the commits on the WP3.0 branch are his doing or somehow as a result of his hard work and commitment to the project. While there is only one @nacin, there is plenty of room for any one of you to be very @nacin like.

By the way, if there is an election and I’m voted out, I’m not leaving without a fight. You’ll have to chase me out of town with torches and pitchforks.

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?

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?

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 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.

@aishing – Check out the following code:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/how-to-make-a-private-community/?topic_page=2&num=15#post-44616

Add it to your theme’s functions.php file.

Try adding the following in wp-config.php:
define( 'BP_ENABLE_USERNAME_COMPATIBILITY_MODE', true );

This should fix your problem.

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.