BuddyPress.org

something like the https://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-private-message-rate-limiter/ may be helpful if you really want to stop 99.9% of it.. that one is premium / costs $19.. but it’s more of a hindrance to the spammers than just the spamshield.. which I use and think it stops 90% of them.. so is the other 9.9% worth the premium.. situations vary..

disclaimer, I am not a bp dev, just a long time user, and my knowledge is far from complete.

1 -each Profile / Member offered a separate gallery or media library?
This was a problem from the very beginning, and perhaps the biggest problem for bp aside from lousy filter options for the activity stream. Initially it was handled by the ‘bp-album’ plugin – which was later abandoned amidst some drama – rtmedia is kind of the standard for handling this now – but it’s bloated, important functions have gotten expensive, and it’s not well supported in core or themes – it’s terrible at keeping things separated like comments on media and galleries –
There is a new bp media like experimental thing that looks promising, and some attempts at making placeholders for bp media have been made in the past year, new hooks for bp attachment, etc. Some code has appeared on github showing a great start at possible core bp media handling – but not enough devs on that.

if you must have media with bp I suggest getting the premium “press permit core” and ask for support in limiting what other users can see in the media library. God forbid you have a problem with users trolling other users – and you have media – as you can purchase the buddyblock plugin which will prevent most abuse user to user, but it does not hook into the separate commenting system that rt-media creates. I strongly encourage you to try the other media plugin and hope that works for what you need before getting stuck with rtmedia and no way to export it’s data to something else.

2 a cap on how many Mb’s a user is allowed to upload for the total amount of media space
Wordpress has a setting for this when using multi-site setup – but I think it affects only what gets posted to the user blogs aka sites. I think rtmedia has an optional purchase-able plugin for this if you use their system to allow for the media uploads – not sure if the other competing system has such functionality.

This is a problem, and a solution should include a way for admins to look at users who have uploaded media, not just by user and space taken up, but also by date. There should be more control for deleting content with various parameters as well. I pity you if you find one day a user has uploaded 100s of photos that violate… terms.. and you have to delete each one at a time. If you find a way to handle this better with rtmedia I’d love for you to share it.

Currently I have tons of photos and videos that users have uploaded and no good way to look at or remove, aside from going profile to profile and manually checking what shows up there. A better way may exist, I have not found it yet.

3 – Why do all members have to be Authors in order to be able to Post because this was the only method that worked for me.
When you say post, that sounds like posting a post to a blog – either their own multi-site blog, or perhaps to a group blog. This is how worpdress is and is great for controlling things with blogs. If you mean a user needs to be an author in order to add to thier “activity stream” aka wall or profile or whatever, I do not think they need to be a blog author in order to do so… “What’s new” activity posts work fine without being a blog author.

4 – BuddyPress and BB Press how should I set up my .htaccess file – this should be documented somewhere around here. Wish I could tell you, I don’t have any bb press running with any buddypress installs any longer.

If you don’t want robots to crawl your site, search for forums for making buddypress private – you’ll want to lock down your site with a password required to view anything – if you really want to block bots.. if it’s just the nicer bots you are referring to, like googlebot, yahoo and bigbots – then you can setup a robots.txt with something like

robots *
disallow /
allow index.php

but I don’t think having the main engines index your index.php is really helpful with most WP themes.. you’d probably be better with “allow /about-us/” for example.. as most wp sites I’ve worked with dont have a good ol’ index.html

your experiences may vary..

With BP you eaither have lots of time to code, or you take everything as is for the most part. Auttomatic has not funded bp well since the first dev Andy left – it’s basically abandoned like unwanted bastard child that gets (almost) no support – and has been for years. Instead depending mainly on volunteer contributors that obviously have to do other things like earn a living and pay bills.

Some great people do amazing things making bp better – I appreciate those that are making the documentation better and fighting the good fight of dealing with all the wp core changes and how they affect bp when it updates – and other work to make it better. However what is seemingly most important to many webmasters and end users may not be on the roadmap for future releases – and finding developers to mod up BP is not as easy as one may hope either.

custom fixes today may well be broken with future updates, and no one has thought about the laws in Europe for privacy and users being able to export data you have them.. all kinds of things..

consider bp a huge mix of free code that is very experimental, and in my humble opinion should be removed from the wp plugin repo if automattic is not going to fund it properly – it certainly should not be on the first page view of plugins – anyone installing it likely has no idea what can of worms they are getting into.

If you are thinking of the future and how you may need to moderate user’s uploads and such, I strongly encourage you to test out the mediapress alternative – but realize in order to get core functionality with bp right now you will have to add on a walled garden from one place or another.. without any import / export options – before you invest too much of your time and your user’s pictures and videos into silos you may never escape, you right as well look into and test out peepso (https://www.peepso.com )- as they seem to have more skin in the game and have made at least some import / export things if I remember correctly.

again, I am not a bp dev. also I have not used mediapress yet – although I would with a fresh install – rtmedia has not met my expectations, although not a total fail, it is only 60% of what it should be. I have not used peepso yet either. Just a guy that’s been running a few bp installs for a few years, and my knowledge is fuzzy at best. surely @ma.tt, others thoughts, and your mileage may vary.

Have you tried this plugin?

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-simple-private/

Yes, my BP brothers, there’s a plugin called BP Simple Private and I think it will solve your problems, without having to work with robots.txt

Prior to using BP Simple Private, my site’s member pages were way too accessible.. You could type http://mysite.com/members <- and you’d see the whole members directory.

Prior to using BP Simple Private, you could type http://mysite.com/members/aaronthomas1979, and you’d jump straight to my profile.

With this plugin, people (or search engine bots,) will be redirected to a page of your choosing, and the member pages will not be displayed.

If you already have the issue of member pages being displayed in search results, there’s nothing you can do to immediately fix that, but make the change (get the plugin) and wait for those bots to crawl your site again, but next time, they won’t find those pages.

It works for me..

I asked a bit too soon… A little more searching and I found your explanation here. Setting the default component seems to have done the trick. Thanks for the code samples!

Sorry, i don’t act privately on user’s site.

If you’re unable to solve your issue, hire somebody who can help you on BP Job Board.

Your snippet use some deprecated code. (bp_is_page( BP_MEMBERS_SLUG ) since 1.8)

Here a similar one who let you make BP almost private…

function bpfr_guest_redirect() {
global $bp;
// enter conditional here
   if ( bp_is_activity_component() || bp_is_groups_component() || bp_is_blogs_component() ||  bp_is_members_component() || is_bbpress() ) {
	
// not logged in user - user will be redirect to any link to want
   if( !is_user_logged_in() ) { 
      //wp_redirect( get_option('siteurl') ); //back to homepage    			
      //wp_redirect( get_option('siteurl') . '/intranet' ); // back to whatever page 
      wp_redirect( get_option('siteurl') . '/register' ); // back to register page	
      } 
   }
}
add_filter( 'get_header', 'bpfr_guest_redirect', 1 );

There’s a few different ways you could go about this, there’s a few privacy plugins that will hide different aspect of the site from public view. One is BP Registration Options, this installs new member moderation (so you can choose who to allow on you site) and BuddyPress privacy, where the BuddyPress pages are all private, but the WordPress pages and posts are still public.

If that’s not private enough for you then there’s BP Simple Private which allows you to hide all aspects of your site apart from the homepage.

You could have normal users simply subscribe to a mailing list, there no need to have them as site members, then you could run the BuddyPress install as private, so that one logged in members see those pages.

Hem… you’re free to use BuddyPress to your needs, but i guess there is a moment where you reach the software limit.
If you publish private activities in the public activity stream, what do you expect ? To compromise privacy or the way the software works ?
As with 99,9% of software, you have to answer by Yes or No to each option you find. For groups, you have 3 options: 1 OR 2 OR 3 and not a bit of each, depending the current wind speed ! It’s private or it’s public, but not Y and N.

So far i know, hidden group members see the hidden group activities when they are on their group activity page. A group is hidden means that “public” can’t see/access to it, so you can’t see those activities on the site activity page.

please use forum’s search before asking !
https://buddypress.org/support/search/private+message+button/

For example:

Disable or Hide Private Message Button

I had the same issue, and since I couldn’t find a solution, I had to make one myself. I thought I’d share.

Add the following to your functions file

function fix_private_message_login() {
    Global $bp;
    if (isset($bp->canonical_stack['component']) && $bp->canonical_stack['component'] == 'messages' && !is_user_logged_in()) {
        header('Location: ' . get_site_url() . '/wp-login.php?redirect_to=' . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
        die();
    }
}
add_action('bp_do_404', 'fix_private_message_login');

If you’re admin, you will most likely be redirected to the admin panel after login (instead of the message), however for all other users, it will redirect you to the message.

Hi @excel1,

such URL is odd and shouldn’t appear on a correctly install setup:
example.com/index.php/beispielbeitrag/

In brief, your install WP at the site root which is: exemple.com
BP is a wp plugin and by the way, will also be at the root.

And as wp is also a blog, that blog is also at example.com (on a page defined in wp’s Read settings).

This means that you can create a page for the blog and name it “besipielbeitrag” and asign this page to posts in WP settings. And make it private or whatever.

BP members or groups will be at exemple.com/members/ or example.com/groups/ and the users at example.com/members/USERNAME/

index.php is one of the files in a theme, but has nothing to do with BP pages or a dedicated blog page.

Also, if emxampel.com and example.com are 2 URL for the same site, or if you installed wp in emxampel.com and BP in example.com, BP won’t work.

I would recomend you to read attentively the install guide from the begin.

Each group has the option to have an associated forum.
Groups can be public, private or hidden.
There can also be site-wide or ‘general’ forums.

Forums require the use of an additional plugin: bbPress.

I also want people who are workshop leaders to be able to see and post to any forum.

You make them members of all groups.
If you’d rather not, then you’ll need to write some custom code.

For option 1 it sounds like you want to set up a private network – not allowing non-logged in users to view profile details etc.

There’s a few options as to how to go about this, here’s a few:

http://buddyuser.com/category/plugin-review/private-network

For option 2, one option might be to display the registration form in a widget area on the front page, it’s possible to only display this widget for logged out users:

http://buddyuser.com/plugin-review-buddy-registration-widget

Thank you so much for this code! I’ve spent several hours trying to use other people’s code to hide the button and even tried to make my own but nothing worked until I found your code. I just switched it around because I only wanted one particular group to not be able to send messages while the rest can.

Posting in case someone in the future needs the opposite of your code:

add_filter( 'bp_get_send_message_button', function( $array ) {
    if ( pmpro_hasMembershipLevel('NAMEOFPMPLEVEL') ) {
        return '';
    } else {
        return $array;
    }
} );

Also, I am looking for the same code as you to restrict non-paying users from sending private messages. I found a code that looks promising but unfortunately doesn’t work. It sees if the user is logged in and if not redirects them. Then if the person is logged in it checks their role but if they’re not that role they’re supposed to be redirected. But it just breaks my whole site. Any ideas?

function my_function() {

    if ( ! is_user_logged_in() && bp_is_current_component( 'messages' ) ) {
        // Current user is not logged in so don't let them see stuff. In this case, private messages 
        wp_redirect( home_url() );
        exit;
    }
        
    $flag = false;
    // Get current user info.
    $user = wp_get_current_user();

    if ( ! in_array( 'student', $user->roles ) ) {
        // The current member is not a student.
        $flag = true;
    }

    if ( $flag && bp_is_current_component( 'messages' )  ) {
        The currently logged-in member is not a student and is trying to view private messaging. Let's redirect them away.
        wp_redirect( home_url() );
        exit;
    }
}
add_action( 'init', 'my_function' );

Have you tried setting the forum to Private? Or Hidden?
Go to wp-admin > Forums > Forum Name > Edit > Visibility

btw – these are the BuddyPress forums.
For support for bbPress you should use their forums.

There’s a few plugins that do that but BP Registration Options allows you to set it as a private network, in BP Registration>>BP Registration