Ok, nice. Thanks! I’ll have to check it out and read up.
I also need “joinless groups” for my community of 175 people. This plugin appears not to work in BP1.2 WPMU2.8.6 currently. When I click the edit link in “Site Admin > Profile > Groups Link” it just reloads the dashboard.
Very good suggestions.. I would like to have a few of those myself.. For instance a forum/group for Help and Support which is active as a group but not listed in the user’s group page.. This to keep global/sitewide forums/groups seperate from groups the users joins out of interest (for example: Baseball)
Exactly. We’re a Ground Search & Rescue Group. So in our case… we need to facilitate communication with the entire membership for things like announcements, general SAR-related news and alarm calls. But we also have a lot of committees (training, management, IT, etc.) which will only interest the members of those committees. If I have to rely on every member actually joining the “General Membership” group… it’ll never happen! I’m running a pre-launch test drive site now with just 20 people and it’s hard enough just getting them to join a group! LOL. So I need a way to “force” everyone (or groups of people) into certain groups. For instance, I could create a custom profile field asking what committees they serve on and map those to their respective groups with the auto-join plugin. And to force all members into a general group… maybe I could use some kind of wildcard. Maybe it will work with 1.2 once 1.2 goes final and includes it’s backwards-compatibility layer.
David have you seen this plugin:
http://buddypress.webdevstudios.com/blog/2009/11/13/buddypress-registration-options/
It pretty much does what you want and helps jumpstart your community.
What I would like to is some kind of option for an admin to create a group which not gets listed in the users group list but the member is actually part of (without choice) and receives updates from. Something you might call a “sitewide group” or something!
@Bowe You already have that option (if I read you correctly) Just use our Auto Join plugin. Create a Hidden Group (no directory) and then go in and use the regressive join feature we added to get all your existing mbrs on. Then you can drive activity form that hidden group. Perhaps provide special links to the group on various pages as necessary to make it easy for mbrs to get the info they need from that group
@david Lewis Our auto join plugin does field mapping (we use it for Class Year and Cadet Company) So you could just use yours for committee selection. No?
@Bowe: I am aware of the user moderation plugin… but I did not know about it’s “join groups upon registration” feature. That’s pretty cool! I’d still be relying on people to actually click those checkboxes though. But that would significantly reduce the ‘friction’ involved in getting people into the right groups. Thanks!
Like you… I’d still like to have a way to have a group that everyone belongs to automatically… without any choice in the matter. Auto Join will hopefully do that for me, but……..
@Mike: I’m running BP1.2-rare on my development box and the plugin doesn’t seem to work. Andy says there will be a compatibility layer or plugin when 1.2 goes public. So maybe it will work then.
@David: No problem.. It’s a very useful plugin and I like the fact that my users have a choice in joining groups they might find interesting, but I’m not FORCING them to join it.
@Mike: That’s some clever thinking! Thanks 
@david works fine on my bleeding 1.2. So yo have it set up based on a particular field that you associate in the admin panel correct? And then a new user signs up and it does not auto join him to that group?
@Bowe. I still want them to have a choice. But for the global group (like your help group)… everyone should be a member so that when I post information everyone will see it. I’m betting that about 90% of my users will require prompting via email notices in order to visit the site. Lots of older hunters and military and outdoorsy types who are not very web savvy. This are people who, for the most part, make fun of things like Facebook and Twitter. They do everything by email. I’m trying to nudge them into the 21st century.
@Mike. In BP1.2-rare and WPMU2.8.6… when I click an edit link in “Site Admin > Profile > Groups Link” it just reloads the wp-admin dashboard.
@David Well, I’m stumped. I am on the same exact install as you and I get he admin panel for auto join when I click on my link. Email me at mike @ mikepratt . tv and I’ll try and figure it out.
Of course, I am now getting
BuddyPress is ready. You’ll need to activate a BuddyPress compatible theme to take advantage of all of the features. We’ve bundled a default theme, but you can always install some other compatible themes.
on 1.2-rare with my theme activated (even though it’s an untouched clone of default. Who knows
@Mike. Good to know. I’ll try disabling all my plugins.
@David. The plugin works for me too just as Mike described.
@Bowe. That user moderation plugin may offer the best solution if it works without the moderation feature being turned on. Will it work? Since I will also be needing this feature.
It was broken actually. There are hard-coded links in the script that reference the plugin folder as “bn-auto-join-group” but in the latest version the plugin folder name is actually “auto-join-groups”. Simply renaming the plugin folder to “bn-auto-join-group” fixes all the broken links and form submissions.
Nope – not for me – renamed the folder “bn-auto-join-group” and still just refreshes the dashboard.
I need a solution to force a default groups or groups on all sign ups – and one that will retro join all users – its necessary for my forum integration or else all old posts are gone.
Anyone?
Oz – did you rename all the hard coded links as well (we didn’t properly write the plugin to easily work on any site. We just released a custom function we wrote because people were asking for an example.
If you are still having problems, email me at mike @ mikepratt . tv and I’ll take a look.
Mike
Oh – ok – i’ll dig back in to it
Thanks Mike
OK. I’m getting the same results as t’others (OzPoker, etc). I’m just getting a BP/WP-MU site going with WPMU 2.9.1 and BP 1.2. Auto-join-goups is the only plugin active (bar BuddyPress). Clicking on the ‘edit’ in Site Admin : Profile -> Groups Link just dumps me back to the blog admin. I have renamed auto-join-groups to bn-auto-join groups to no avail. I have a single group already created.
I grepped bn-auto-join-group.php and found ‘hard’ links on lines 23, 88, and 122. It doesn’t strike me that this is actually the issue here.
Thanks for any help offered.
Cheers
Mark
@markpea it should work. stumped so far. can u tell me what the Edit link on the right column points to on your install?
Wonderful! I was just asking about the same thing yesterday: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/join-all-public-groups-at-once and glad I found this plugin. Experimenting…
Has anyone gotten Auto Join Groups to work with Buddypress 1.2 or 1.3?
