BuddyPress.org

We don’t even know if cookies are the issue.

His cookie domain info was set to “”. It’s not that it wasn’t set. It was set to null. So if wp gets to a spot where it wants to set it to a sane default value, it detects that it’s already set and doesn’t. Probably. The empty string is a value.

They would get loaded after the WPMU ones, so if there’s no check for them pre-existing, then they obviously overwrite them.

I currently don’t have a cookie_domain setup in wp-config.php either and everything works fine. It should get assigned by WPMU in wp-settings.php if it isn’t in the config.

In the wp-config.php file, verify:

$base = '/';

define('DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'domain.com' );

define('PATH_CURRENT_SITE', '/' );

define('SITE_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1);

define('BLOGID_CURRENT_SITE', '1' );

…where domain.com is obviously your domain. If you are using any settings unlike what I posted above, paste them here please.

I wonder if the messaging system uses cookies?

It doesn’t sound really like the issue the 3 of us found. Does it? I just got finished working with somebody yesterday. His problem was that creating one group after another on the same computer caused the 2nd group to adopt the group id of the 1st group.

The underlying issue and solution was that he didn’t have any cookie domains set in wp-config.php

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=3452

These cookie issues are tough to debug. We do the ‘works for me’ thing because our wpmu instances are different. Right now bp relies on the wpmu instance supplying the cookie path and domain. Perhaps to cover such situations bp should specify it’s path and domain. Would that bypass the wpmu credentials? Would it matter?

Here we go again. Burt, Jeff, man your battle stations.

We’ll take a look at it.

Right now on testbp.org it looks like it’s working correctly. Was this an upgrade from a previous BuddyPress install, and if so, did you upgrade your member theme files also?

Ilya is correct about not having the ability to delegate.admin powers to a moderator. This is a very crucial issue. In a large community, people come and go. Their interests and time change. So say someone creates a group. They by default become an administrator. That means they are the only one to have the following powers in a group:

• Group Settings
  Group Avatar
  Manage Members (i.e. bump them to moderators)
  Delete Group

So if we play out this scenario, and the administrator has fallen off the radar, the group settings from public to private to hidden cannot be changed except by the Buddypress site admin. The Buddypress site admin can elevate members to moderators but they CANNOT add an adminstrator, as far as I can determine. The Buddypress site admin can delete the group but the only way to “delegate” administrator powers would be to follow this scenario:
Appoint a moderator willing to take over. Have them create a new group, and then do a mass invite to join that new group via a news post or a friends invite.

Can a administrator be changed at the db level? Not sure.

What about asking the group administrator to exercise their option to ‘leave a group?’ I have no idea what that would do to the db and the Buddypress system. I’m hoping Andy or Jeff might chime in here on this odd possible outcome.

Cheers,
Brian

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.