BuddyPress.org

I administer two social sites and both are asking of there is any way to remove notifications of people joining the group and who made friends with whom… It is plugging up the group notification area and users are getting annoyed.
I have searched for appropriate plugins and found a few but all are depreciated and mess up the site.
Wordpress 4.7.3
Buddypress 2.8.2
Bbpress 2.5.12

I found a code hack for the functions.php but it can’t be used in the child “guideline” theme. When added to the child, I lose admin pages. code snippet below

// Remove (hide) various activities from streams.
function my_hidden_activities($a, $activities) {
//if admin we want to know
//if (is_site_admin())
// return $activities;

$nothanks = array(“new_blog_post”, “created_group”, “joined_group”, “new_member”, “friendship_created”, “activity_liked”);

foreach ($activities->activities as $key => $activity) {
if (in_array($activity->type, $nothanks, true)) {
unset($activities->activities[$key]);
$activities->activity_count = $activities->activity_count-1;
$activities->total_activity_count = $activities->total_activity_count-1;
$activities->pag_num = $activities->pag_num -1;
}
}

// Renumber the array keys to account for missing items.
$activities_new = array_values( $activities->activities );
$activities->activities = $activities_new;

return $activities;
}
add_action(‘bp_has_activities’, ‘my_hidden_activities’, 10, 2 );

The author suggests adding to functions.php but without using the child theme the code would be lost after an update. It also broke the site… Even after reverting the changes, the menu and page formatting was gone.

Is there any way that is up to date to filter what activity is reported on the group wall?