BuddyPress.org

Hi @julianprice,

Your proposal is respectable, but unfortunately I do not think it will have a big impact on visitors to this forum. Most of them just ask for help, not for explanations and certainly not to take lessons! The explanations are (mostly) on Codex (thxs @mercime, @hnla) and the plasters for big and little sores are (sometimes, thxs contributors) on the forum.

I reply to your message because this is the second time you propose this type of approach and this is obviously a topic that you would like to heart. But this is about you, your views and your motivation. In front you have a diverse audience, ranging from amateur to pro, between noobs and specialists, from many different countries, with very different mentalities and very different social behaviors. And as you can see by browsing the forum, topics are usually short, sometimes poorly worded and often unanswered. Hard to read ? No, it is only the BP audience in his whole variety !

The reasons are multiple, irrespective of audience: lack of product knowledge, panic facing an unidentified problem and therefore inability to articulate, language barrier, and much more serious, lack of time, real or perceived problem, given to the treatment of a case. We are in 2014 and on the Internet, where each ms. count !

As already said, the helpers community is small, very small compared to buddypress downloads ! Personally I would have difficulty establishing a Helpers Top 50, despite my six years of attendance in this forum.

Anyway, all of this is common to any support forum, at least I observed. This support forum is not a discussion forum, is not a course forum, is not a philosophy forum. And IMO, it is allright so.

You want to educate ? Ok ! But does the BP audience want to learn ?
Learning is a complex process, on an individdual and collective point of view.
Learning suppose some basics, such as a thematic unicity, volonty, curiosity, motivation and, at least, a handfull of humility.

Educating. Wow ! There is so much to say about that… Ok. Let us talk about educating over BuddyPress… What part we address first ? PHP ? HTML ? CSS ? MySql ? Server administration ? SEO ? Usage ? BP is only a shell, not a unic thematic like a math course.
Ideally, educating needs some talents, a robust knowledge of a subject, a natural disposition to teach and a lot of time and disponibility without any guarantee of results. You certainly need also a good dose of self-denial and a large space behind you to be able to step back in any circumstance. And a handfull of humility. Too !

Now, let us consider John Doe. The supposed to be educated user.

The majority struggles when asking for help to strangers. Asking a question on a forum is more like a message in a bottle as a grammatical demand between four eyes to your English teacher. How many people read only on forums but never ask anything because of this feeling?
And which attitude to adopt when we receive a response, good or bad? Must we say thank you if the help doesn’t match our goal? Should we rephrase with the risk to be considered as a profiteer? Should we hook in a topic believed to be identical to our problem and already written (time spare is time spare!!!) or open a new tread? This are so commonly questions, that the world wide forumers needed to create from scratch a web specific phenomenon: the troll!

Askink for help under these conditions and with such uncertain issues is not easy at all.
Receiving any kind of answer is not easy, too.
Receiving a circonstanciated answer, with various explanation, examples, links and tutti quanti, from an unknowed person, personally, voluntarily and without consideration, is very very stressfull and really difficult to accept. Take a minute to consider this point, because we are all, and all over the world, habituate to handle such a situation with money, not (no more or not yet) with our felling. Consider also that we are all dependent and in varying degrees of mood, touchy, selfish, proud. This is more or less our daily reality who, when on a forum page, we opposite to a disembodied screen readed text. It’s very unnatural, no ? And so difficult to digest for any normally constituted human for sure ! Affect against computer. EOL.

Do you really want to <i>Educate the General Public</i> about BuddyPress ? Do you want to proselytize or advertize ? Create a dedicated site, do your stuff, and maybe with a few chance, great patience and a lot of perseverance, you will come to aggregate in a few years a cute pretty lttle buddypresser community.

Dan. Paris. France.

Hi @davinadanian

What is the difference between using BuddyPress from the webiste versus downloading it to your computer?

Do you mean like wordpress.com and wordpress.org?

BuddyPress is downloadable only – there is no web service version of it available like there is with wordpress.com.

you can search for BP members via the regular WP+BP search. Comes with BP and if you want to extend member search use the following plugin

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-profile-search/

I’m trialling Flyzoo chat… it uses buddy press logins as username and users can upload avatars, and they have told me that within a week they should have update to restrict guests, so chat does not show up on front page unless user logged on. Its hosted on the cloud, so no load on your host..It is not free but for what you gets its cheap..starts at 1.90 per month. I’m new to WordPress, but it seems good. Support responds really fast which is always a bonus..
Hope that helps..
http://www.flyzoo.co/

Is there an easy way to do this?

Yes. You can do this quite easily.

1. Choose a Facebook login plugin from the WP plugin repo:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/

Maybe try searching for 'social login'

2. Hide the BuddyPress registration form

Just bypass the login page with something like wp_set_auth_cookie( 1, false, true ).

Where 1 is the user ID of your admin account.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_set_auth_cookie

sem101 – I use two plugins that ask questions before signup

Buddypress Humanity
and
Good Question

This prevents most of the bot sign ups that we plaguing us for some time with those group creators.

This does not stop the manual spam signups, so we have delete a few accounts each week, but it has prevented the tons that we were dealing with before.

We used to have good luck with /bp-registration-options/

but we started having some issues around bp1.7 I think. Other people say it works now (https://buddypress.org/support/topic/feature-request-new-user-moderation/ ) – but I don’t have time to play with half baked / half working solutions. Your experience with it may be fine.

We do not use si captcha any longer as we had issues with some multisite problems. I do think it slowed down some of the spammers, and certainly cost them time and a little money to get around it – so it’s cool.

I use one of the blog defaults type plugins to auto set new blogs/(sites) to have settings like ‘users must be logged in to comment’ – and “discourage search engines from indexing” – this has helped a bunch for us.

Of course the manual spammers will still need to be manually deleted – you will never stop the manual spammers, if you did, then you would stop regular people from signing up. Unless of course you went for one of those “invite only” buddypress setups.

I recently donated to a plugin author to create a new plugin that allows superadmins to force certain settings on sub-site/sub-blog users.. like forcing only allowing registered / logged in users to comment. That plugin is working, but it is not quite polished enough for wp repository release I think – but that is another kind of spam blocking issue.

Hope these tips help you, they have made a huge difference for me.

arg – tried to post a reply and I think it got akistmetted for having two links…
/wonders why they do not whitelist links to wordpress org / buddypress org here for that setting somehow.. sheesh

sem101 – I use two plugins that ask questions before signup

Buddypress Humanity
and
Good Question

This prevents most of the bot sign ups that we plaguing us for some time with those group creators.

This does not stop the manual spam signups, so we have delete a few accounts each week, but it has prevented the tons that we were dealing with before.

We used to have good luck with https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-registration-options/screenshots/

but we started having some issues around bp1.7 I think. Other people say it works now (https://buddypress.org/support/topic/feature-request-new-user-moderation/ ) – but I don’t have time to play with half baked / half working solutions. Your experience with it may be fine.

We do not use si captcha any longer as we had issues with some multisite problems. I do think it slowed down some of the spammers, and certainly cost them time and a little money to get around it – so it’s cool.

I use one of the blog defaults type plugins to auto set new blogs/(sites) to have settings like ‘users must be logged in to comment’ – and “discourage search engines from indexing” – this has helped a bunch for us.

Of course the manual spammers will still need to be manually deleted – you will never stop the manual spammers, if you did, then you would stop regular people from signing up. Unless of course you went for one of those “invite only” buddypress setups.

I recently donated to a plugin author to create a new plugin that allows superadmins to force certain settings on sub-site/sub-blog users.. like forcing only allowing registered / logged in users to comment. That plugin is working, but it is not quite polished enough for wp repository release I think – but that is another kind of spam blocking issue.

Hope these tips help you, they have made a huge difference for me.

Roles (and responsibilities) are handled by WordPress. See here for more info:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities

@okamiokami
You can test some of the solutions in this ticket that simply stops the activation email from being sent then use BP’s new build in activation to manually activate the users. Of coarse I haven’t tested this but its worth a shot.
https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3443

https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

Above plugin is the only plugin you will ever require to stop spam. Donate to plugin author if it stops spam on your site to keep the plugin alive

https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

Above plugin is the only plugin you will ever require to stop spam. Donate to plugin author if it stops spam on your site to keep the plugin alive

https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

Above plugin is the only plugin you will ever require to stop spam. Donate to plugin author if it stops spam on your site to keep the plugin alive

Of course you can change these tab labels.
Read here and here for general information.

It’s possible that the problem comes from your theme or a plugin. You have to debug…:evil:
First thing to check is the content of your language folder.
Normally buddypress-xx_XX.mo/po files are in wp-content/languages/
See also if you have a “plugin” folder in “languages”. Maybe you have a second buddypress-xx_XX.mo in it. In this case, it is this file who has priority over the other. If you have a custom translation, you have to place it in this folder anyway.

Second thing to check are the theme/(possible)plugin translation vs. BP translation.

FYI, since BP 2.0, WP/BP/bbP translations are automatically updated from Translate WordPress (Glotpress), but you have to ensure that you have the correct version. Simply open the .po file with a text editor like notepad++ and read the header content.

If the above debuging process have no result, here’s a good solution by Alex ( @viper007bond) to “force” a translation or customizing an existing.
Successfully tested on BP 2.01 ! 😉

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activate-users-in-buddypress

basically you need to get the Last Activity field set for this users manually.

@robertnorcross Just to let you know I am just learning to figure so of these out. So this is what I think I understand it works:

multisite install by default allows users to login with same info.

you may also want to post over on wordpress support forum for multisite.

I was reading so article & now don’t remember that subscriber on multisite don’t automatically become members which confuse me know.

I am pretty sure there is probably login redirect plugin but haven’t used any to recommend.

I am also unfamiliar with commerce sites but do you want to redirect someone before they complete their purchase to buddypress.

I think multisite forum may be could more helpful and to be honest I thinking of just going back to single installs & migrate later. I have multiple sites like you too with various focused it has been challenge wrapping my head around it all.

This plugin, though not updated for a very LONG time, still works.

Might be a LITTLE help in the ongoing battle against spam!

https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/buddypress-humanity

Security question/answer can produce a text-string, not just a sum, answer.

Yes, the above is a rather awkward solution.

Just occurred to me that you could extract the info you need from the $settings_link arg passed by the $email_content filter hook to further query the database and/or rebuild $email_content – and so avoid filtering wp_mail

I think it would be a reasonable request that the
$email_content filter hook in messages_notification_new_message include $ud.

It’s a simple change, so please submit an enhancement ticket:
https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/

[ We may find out that there is an existing and simple solution ! ]

>adding the two on the end is useless

You can’t add new args to an apply_filters call.

You might try using the first filter in wp_mail()
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/3.9.1/src/wp-includes/pluggable.php#L225

And then use the ‘to’ value to query the database directly to retrieve the recip’s username.
Look at https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/wpdb, in particular $wpdb->get_var

Then you can rebuild ‘message’.

Of course the add_filter function needs a conditional check so that you don’t mess with other wp-mail calls.
I do something like:
-use one of the filters in function messages_notification_new_message to add a keyword
-check for that keyword in your filter function for wp_mail()

btw- wp_mail is pluggable, so you can overload it with your own function, but that shouldn’t be necessary.

i think its more due to the fact that nobody is talking about ning anymore their system isn’t very open technically speaking. for instance when i do a google search for ‘social network in a box’ or ‘social network software’ there are many references to buddypress in the results but none for ning. i know when i was looking at ning in 2010 coincidentally enough i decided their lack of customer service and locked in system weren’t a good way to go for our network. in fact ning isn’t even listed in the wikipedia list of social networking software options:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_social_networking_software

although maybe because it’s a platform and not really software you can install.

one more thing i would add is that a lot of the really popular dedicated buddypress plugins are now wordpress plugins as well so they may not really show up as buddypress only plugins anymore.

Hi theaquaponicsource

There’s quite a lot of development activity going on right now with BP “under the hood” so to speak. Have a read of this blog post which announces the recent release of BP 2.0:

BuddyPress 2.0 “Juliana”

And keep in mind many of the WP plugins in the WordPress plugin repo work solidly on BP, you don’t necessarily need to use ‘BP plugins’ only:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/