BuddyPress.org

I’m glad you brought that up, because while BP is awesomely powerful and brilliantly extensible, sometimes I feel the activity stream is “polluted” by the fact that activity updates don’t have a true home. They live in the stream itself, unlike any other content type.

I think this is the most confusing thing about BP, and the part I have a lot of trouble explaining to users. They “get” the Wall concept, and would understand Wire, but the way BP is set up by default now, posting a status update makes me feel like I am intruding, as if I were on Facebook and posting directly into the News Feed. (You actually can post directly on Facebook’s news feed… but if you do, your post is quietly moved out the next time you refresh and “Top News” shows up).

BP would be so neat and easy to “get” if the activity stream was just that – a meta-stream of activity, so indeed, deleting someone’s status update from the activity stream would simply remove it from view. It would still live on the Profile page or where-ever. The fact that “activity stream delete” behaves inconsistently depending on content type — sometimes it deletes, sometimes it removes — is at least an argument that the BP metaphors might do well to evolve a bit (beyond their already highly evolved state )

So yeah… for “activity updates”, I’m going to have to do a conditional based on activity type (if activity_update then display “delete”, otherwise “remove”). Maybe a fancier solution would be to store an activity meta value (is_removed) and if that’s set to 1 (true), skip it when the activity loop is polled?