Fell in love with BP through the CUNY Commons, but not all web communities wish to be wide open to the public.

Years ago, there were a handful of plugins that helped to make a BuddyPress multi-site install private. I put together a sweet little community for some senior citizens back then. Seems like those plugins are all dead now. After days of researching and reading outdated forum posts, I am scratching my head asking things like, “So how does one disable the public visibility of member activity feeds?”

Is it actually possible to create a members-only community with BuddyPress 2.1.1. without hacking BP?

Thanks for any feedback.

[@bphelp Participant 10 years ago]

@wadsworth4
What plugins did you use for making BP multisite private? I offer some premium plugins to make BP private but I personally haven’t tested it with BP multisite because I don’t really use it. For my purposes my Private Community For BP plugin does everything I need it to do.

[@wadsworth4 Participant 10 years ago]

Thanks for the feedback, bp-help. We didn’t use your plugin. There were others we used (especially BuddyPress Private Community) and some BP hacks.

The BP team and the plug developers all seem like great folks, and the community is friendly and active. Have spent a lot of time with vids of their presentations. Like the product, like the people, but the privacy of closed communities is critical. The question is still out there:

Is it actually possible to create a members-only community with BuddyPress 2.1.1. and multi-site WP without hacking BP?

[@bphelp Participant 10 years ago]

@wadsworth4
I also have another plugin that I was told on the plugins forum that it worked on multisite called “Private BP Pages.” However I never actually tested it myself on BP with multisite. I just got that info from some of the users of the plugin. I used to offer it on the WordPress repo up to about 3 months ago but I have since removed it. But to answer your question “Yes” it is possible to create a members-only community with the latest BP and WP multisite by creating a plugin or using a function in bp-custom.php using hooks etc. That way your not hacking BP and if you update BP you won’t lose your changes.