BuddyPress.org

Have you configured components by checking friend connections located under Settings > BuddyPress > Components https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/configure-components/

https://mercime.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/bpcomponents1.png

@mth75 what other plugins do you have installed.

You may also want to check out this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-articles/ heard great things about it but haven’t used myself.

Hi
I have a wordpress theme and I have two plugins one is buddypress v2.0.1 and the other is Commons In A Box that tells me that my theme is not buddypree compatible can you tell me what and where I should add to my theme that will make it buddypress compatible. I do understand that the way my theme looks and functions is up to me. I see 1000’s of buddypress themes what makes theme compatible and my’s not?

EMac

@dta_madrid

Further to @shanebp’s method, WordPress has a function called count_users() which can be used to get the number of users in each role.

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

$users = count_users();

// display total users (if you want to).
echo $users['total_users'] . ' total users';

// display count for contributors. 
foreach( $users['avail_roles'] as $role => $count ) {
    if ( $role == 'contributor' )
        echo $count . ' contributors';
}

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