BuddyPress.org

Wonder if you could use this to create extra forums like a Miscellaneous or a General forum? I want to use the default install because I like the way it all integrated with the group forums, but I wanted to have some general forums for random stuff that I really don’t want to have to force people to sign up to that group just to post there. Right now, having to skin and deal with external bbpress installation seems more of a hassle than dealing with the random forum for me.

Using trunk + single wp; I’m set up on an external installs of bbPress + BuddyPress/internal install for groups

I use the bpGroups plugins (“forums” subdomain of the BP site) but the plug-in required some updating to get everything working smooth (activity notifications, public/private/hidden/ready only stuff)

Obviously this method won’t enable plugins on the buddypress/internal groups but this allows me to provide an advanced forum interface while creating outside forums (support, help, testing, etc) not associated with groups (group forums can be added to a specific forum category – i think default is “1”).

… i have re-theme’d bbPress to somewhat match the new default BP theme (well somewhat)

(screenshots:

http://files.etiviti.com/misc/bbpress-vwg-main.gif

http://files.etiviti.com/misc/bbpress-vwg-forum.gif

)

Works for me. You obviously have to be a member of the private group to see updates, and you only see them listed on the activity section of the Group page (not the list on the homepage of the site).

My guess is you are not quite understanding the way private messaging was intended to work. As the name implies, it is a private message. When you send a “private” message to 40 friends, it’s not quite “private” anymore, by some definitions. The same occurs in email when one of your 40 recipients hits “reply all” assuming they were not bcc’d.

As such, when you send a bp message to 40 people, you are, in a sense, establishing a 40 person thread. That’s the way it’s supposed to work (which is great for smaller numbers) In other words, expect 40 replies to the thread and all 40 will get 40 messages. Seems ripe for trouble when you send it to 40! (btw, I am impressed you were able to have the patience to pull off 40 as you had to remember and type 40 names or usernames since this is the only way to do it in BP at the moment.

Second, if you send a message that, upon reply, many members will deem the response as “spam” consider not starting the thread. Just remember, BP messaging was not meant to be like email.

They do.

getting someones attention by using “Private Message” and “Public Message” including sending a notification by e-mail is perfect.

But why do we need the letter “@” in order to get someones attention ?

If you want to hire someone to implement a captcha on the compose message page, please post in this group -> https://buddypress.org/groups/buddypress-job-board

I guess Jeffs Privacy-Plugin would help:

http://jeffsayre.com/2009/12/05/buddypress-privacy-component-released/

Too bad this plugin will not make it into BP 1.2 core !

@davidlewis

Funny you say that, because I’ve had two totally unrelated client sites that said the exact opposite. They were confused about the private message setup, and when they saw the persons name prepoulated as a link, they clicked that link to that person every time, went to their profile again, assumed private messages didn’t work, and complained. Strange how the world works eh?

Because Twitter has owned the @reply idea, if ours doesn’t work similar, it probably won’t work at all. Same with hashtags. All a hashtag is, is a tag to search through streams by. It’s like tagging activity, which can be done via a plugin now that there’s activity meta.

Right now the only place and the only time the @name works, is when you’re updating your status to directly mention specific users. That kind of makes it a technology that won’t get used too often. There is also only 1 place to automatically populate that users @name in the update box, and that’s when you’re viewing their profile already. Twitter makes the activity stream the central source for all things activity, including @ing people back and forth. Maybe if user names in the activity_content were all given a specific class we could use some jQuery to turn that class into a link that auto-populates the update box instead of making it a link to their profile? That would help fully endorse the @name idea in multiple places, rather than just 1.

When you send a private message you see their name in a button beside the textarea. When you send a public message you get a textarea pre-populated with @username. I think if you instead got a textarea with their name in a button beside the textarea… just like a private message… that would be more consistent. It would also be less prone to user error. For instance, I can envision someone wanting to public message “Jim Smith” clicking the button and seeing “@unibomber” in the textarea and thinking… what the?! And then deleting the offending weird text. It sounds ridiculous… but sit down with some non-computer savvy users and you will be amazed :o)

That said… it sounds like you’re aware of that and will be putting some thought into it in future releases. So that’s great.

I guess the question is… if we your don’t rely on the @ shorthand… how would someone make mention of someone else without using the “Public Message” button? Could there be some kind of auto-complete text box for targeting your comments? Or would the @ shorthand simply remain as-is and be considered a “power user” feature.

Just thinking out loud :o)

Upgrade to the latest trunk version of BP 1.2.

“Send Public Message” and “Send Private Message” was added in about a week ago.

@balbert if you look at 1.2 (on testbp.org) you will notice there are 2 types of Send Message. Public and private. the private is as you say. The public is merely a status update.

@ray – i really appreciate this. it’s all clear to me now. I can now manually hide the group forum in bbpress (irregardless of public or private or hidden group). Its quite basic but works fine i.e. group members must go their group site to have access to the group forum.. which is cool btw.

In step #2 above:

How do we make sure that all new group forums are automatically added into the forum category? At the moment, its added as another forum, so we have to manually change this as child to the bbpress forum category for group created in Step #2.

Thanks again for your meticulous help & instructions abv.

@ray, i tested this again: enabled buddypress forum in the component setup, then reinstalled forum using existing bbpress installation setting ***.

I created a private group with forum enabled and posted a topic in this group forum. I then logout, used other browser to view the wpmu forum (bbpress), and I can still see the topic posted in the bppress that should have been a private post. When logged in as another user (non-group member), i can reply to that topic! That’s the privacy issue that I was talking abt.

*** would selecting new installation of bbpress overwrite my existing bbpress ?

I used a different approach for our BuddyPress using a BuddyPress filter to exclude all private Blogs activities from showing up:

http://blogs.zmml.uni-bremen.de/olio/2010/01/12/activity-privacy-plugin-for-buddypress/

Ercih, if you set your bp groups to be PRIVATE, the forum in that group is actually using bbpress; and will be visible to users that go directly to bbpress itself — they can read, post new topics, edit, delete their topics — just like a normal bbpress stuffs that really defeats the purpose of having a privacy option for BP Groups, i.e. those that is setup with forum.

I hope I am completely wrong; but this is what I am seeing with my wpmu2.8.6+bp1.1.3+bbpress1.0.2

I am not sure I understand:

are you saying, that if you create a “Private Group” within BP, then the associated “Group-Forum” is not private ?

So when creating a private Group, the Forum-posts are still visible by everybody ?

Fantastic plugin which I came across in error

However I see a problem:

1) I’ve posted my first link and set it to private, so only I can see it… But after posting the link, there’s no way of deleting it via the admin panel as it doesnt appear.

Yes you can delete it from the front end, but thought Id report this anyway in case you wasn’t aware.

I’m using BP 1.1.3 and WP 2.8.6

Other than the above- Fantastic plugin. Probably the best 3rd party one ive come across yet

**EDIT** I see the problem now- If you made the link public, it will then display in the admin panel. However don’t you think admins should be able to see ALL links, private or not?

I found a fix here: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/more-privacy-options-private-blogs-and-activity-streams. Worked for me.

TLDR version: Introduce types of groups. e.g. “User group” type – it has no forum, no “Home” page, just members listing and activity stream. This group added to Activity Stream filters where relevant.

Would have to filter out custom group type “User group” out of the /groups/directory page & member profile group page.

These custom group types could be set so they are publicly visible/private to those members involved/or hidden (visible to the creator only). As per current Group privacy settings.

Could add e.g. “Friends”, “Colleagues” and “Fans” as default, empty groups for each user on user registration. Obviously revise theme to make the “Friends” page (“Connections”, maybe) look like the Friends page rather than a regular Group.

Different users might create “User group” types with the same name but with different meaning (“Fans” could be interpreted several ways for example). This is no problem as such categorisation is defined — and belongs to — the user who does it. Might need some semantic group kind/type identifier in the code to allow FOAF/SIOC RDF profiles to be able to assigned to these “User groups”.

When composing a private message, is the javascript being loaded? Look in the page source and copy-and-paste the javascript URL in your browser and see if it loads up a text file.