BuddyPress.org

I just recovered from a bad spam incident on my buddypress site. A user (who looked legit) suddenly started private messaging the whole community with obviously spam material resulting in some very angry members

I will go ahead and install Akismet and a captcha during registration H.owever, is it true that each user has to obtain their own key from wordpress.com and plug it into Akismet to get it to work? Is there an alternative that I can just activate for everyone? Or can I just provide all my members with my key to activate their akismet?

Also, what steps have other BP admin used to prevent the kind of spam that I mentioned above? I do not think Akismet & the captcha during registration would have helped in this situation.

Is there a plugin that flags users who message a lot of users in a short time? Something like that might help fight spammers.

Thanks.

@P.S. The plugin looks good and how about adding a plugin forcing guest to register to view members & groups profiles ?

I created plugin that gives users option to choose which profile data they want to share. It is not exactly what you are looking for, but maybe it can help someone.

For details, please go to:

http://devbox.computec.de/2009/06/buddypress-xprofile-privacy-plugin/

If a blog is listed as “Private” in the blog settings, that should also exclude it from the list. It will also exclude it from blog search engines and the like. Not sure how private you want this to be, but that’s about as private as it gets.

I am confused by what you are asking. You have password protected a post but then you want it to show up in the site activity and on the regular blog posts listing. This is just not how this WP feature works.

You choose the “Password Protect This Post” option to make a given blog post private. This means that only people with the correct password can see the post, can read it.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

Did you manage to get it hiding certain fields? I need to ask people for sensitive data that I don’t want shown on the public profile. Would this suffice and where in the code do I need to flip it?

This is exactly what I need….is there a plugin?

@Petronic, liaise with Andy or Jeff Sayre or make a privacy plugin ?

I am very interested in privacy component. How is it going so far? Do you have some estimation when will it be available to test or use?

What I have found as a must regarding privacy (until now) is:

– allowing user to set what details from profile s/he wants to be public, available just to friends or private

– settings on activity streams which will allow user to select what type of activities s/he wants to be displayed in sitewide activity, be available to friends or be totally private. This settings could be similar to Notification settings (for email notifications).

I intended to write this on my own, but found out that it can’t be done easily without changing activity core files (and that is never a good option) and then I discovered that you are working on privacy component. So, if you see a way how I can help in development process, please let me know.

Hey Erich,

i know a developer who is able to achieve this. They wrote me a private message on the german buddypress forum as a reply to my post:

http://forum.wordpress-deutschland.org/buddypress/48801-buddypress-international-benutzerdatenbank-teilen.html

Maybe we could work somehow together to get something suitable for both of us. If you are interested in the developer write me a PM and i sent you the details (you can write in german if you want).

Is there anyway I can hide the “group creation” option from the users? Basically, only admin can create the “groups”.

Removing post cuz it was WRONG!! lol – (sorry about that)

Any clue on a fix for the escapes? I’m having the issue in group topic titles. Groups look fine but when you look at the topic in bbPress, there are escapes in the title.

Posting via bbPress it works fine. Posting via groups, the titles get escapes.

Hoping the fix for this can be applied to my issue as well. (using BP1, bbPress alpha6, wpmu 2.7.1)

Corourke, which version of BP are you using?

I’m still seeing this issue as well as it occurring in profile form fields.

Kit-

I’m sorry you’re having troubles with your theme folders. To be clear, I want to make sure that you realize that you were not, as you state:

advised to change my “bphome” name to preserve it in case of future BP upgrades.

I assume you’re talking about the discussion we had in this thread you asked:

I assume renaming the theme is simply changing the name of its folder?

I responded:

That is correct. Make a copy of the bpmember theme, rename your copy, make whatever changes you want to it, and you have–in effect–a custom theme! Just make sure you keep your new theme in the /wp-content/bp-themes/ directory.

Also, in this thread where I advised you to:

Follow the same procedure as before. Make a backup of the standard bphome theme, rename it to something new…

This means, rename your backup to something new, not change the name of the original theme folder.

Furthermore, as per a private conversation you initiated with me on May 6 via the members messaging system, I state that:

Make sure that you make a copy of both bphome theme and bpmember theme. Your customizations should be done in copies, not the original. That way, if you have issues with your custom themes (and we all do when working on customization), you can switch back to the standard BP themes to see how things should work.

And, as we were talking about CSS issues in that private message and you stated that you had WordPress theming experience, I assumed you knew that the primary style file in BuddyPress, style.css, would need to reflect your new theme’s name.

If you were confused by my advice, I do apologize. But, if you had done what I advised, you would have made a copy of the original theme and altered the copy. As I stated in my private message response to you, do not alter the original theme files.

Well, when I did this for bpgroups I just piggybacked onto the groups component. bpgroups records new topic and post activity that is directly created in bbpress. Since bp group forums was already recording the activities, I just had to simulate the same thing.

The function bp_activity_record() in bp-activity.php does the grunt work. It takes about a zillion parameters. Here’s how I did it:

$activity = array(

'item_id' => (int)$group_id,

'component_name' => 'groups',

'component_action' => 'new_forum_post',

'is_private' => 0,

'secondary_item_id' => (int)$post['post_id'],

'user_id' => (int)$post['poster_id'] );



// create a group obj that the rest of bp can use, play nice

$group_obj = new BP_Groups_Group($group_id);

groups_record_activity($activity);

groups_record_activity() in bp-groups.php takes an array param and if you look in there it eventually calls bp_activity_record()

You’ll have to figure out how to translate all the params that takes into the table colums and eventually into what you see displayed. There aren’t any docs for the activity streams as far as I know.

That sounds good, thanks.