BuddyPress.org

hi everyone, I’m hoping that someone can help me or send me to read stuff as i’ve been banging my head with this problem all day!

i’ve got a buddypress installation with hte latest version and i set up some custom fields for the user profiles. in the standard WP installation there is a display_name feature under profiles which allows to chose from the name fields or the the nicename. i want to use nicknames as well as proper names, but display the nicknames by default.
interestingly, when someone updates their profile using the buddypress profile page the ‘nickname’ and the ‘display_name’ are defaulted back to the default user_nicename is.
this is quite annoying so i created a trigger in the database to change it to my buddypress profile nickname. the trigger works if i fire the update from mysql, but if i use the profile form the trigger is ignored or superimposed.

can anyone suggest possible solutions/workarounds to assign the buddypress cutom field ‘nickname’ to the default worpress user disaply_name?

thanks!