BuddyPress.org

@hnla nice ideal for a thread.

@whoever Where’s the RSS feed for the thread? Would love to bookmark.

It’s the whole Twitter / Facebook hybrid. Trying to emulate too many features from popular, existing social networks.

The main UI problem is groups. BP tried to copy how Facebook setup forums. But then, in v1.2, BP added Twitter-like activity streams.

For groups, you can either go one way – embrace the activity stream or embrace the forums. It’s not the best thing to try and have it both ways. But this is a decision the BP admin should make (which it is right now). At the end of the day, BP gives you free reign to customize your community all you want.

@modemlooper has got the right idea (although I don’t agree with the usage of the word “fork”). Trim down the features you don’t want by customization.

Some great points in this thread.

I think the whole concept of the ‘activity stream’ is best migrated into a per-user basis. By that I mean, I get to see the activity I care about. Groups that I follow, threads I’ve started or replied to (or even viewed often, as a sort of auto-subscribe), the activities of my friends and so on. When you have a community with thousands of active users, no one’s gonna be interested in every single new item except maybe the ones most deeply invested in the site, and even they will barely have time to skim-read through it all.

I found the new site-wide activity feed very confusing, especially since it pulls in not just threads, but replies. I have no interest in reading a snippet like “I’ll look into that” without a clue what the discussion is about.

If a site really believes that new users won’t be content just reading the latest blog posts before they dig after their items of interest on their own, they could just make a ‘featured activity’-page, which would work just like the personal activity stream except in public.

Heck, why not just make groups able to subscribe to content the same way users do? An example use case would be a developers group, where the developers could monitor particular activities that all devs should be aware of. This way, every item on BP that could be subscribed to would have both a ‘subscribe’ and ‘subscribe with group’ (for which you could select many of course).

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Now, as for the very activity stream of ‘updates’ itself, I never fancied this feature. The way I see it it’s just a lightweight forum, in which case it makes no sense to keep it separate from BP’s other forum component. The way I’d make an activity stream (or, simple microblogging rather) would be by tags. In my group the ‘microupdates’ plugin would be enabled. Now all I’d have to do would be to add the ‘update’ tag to a forum post whenever I wanted it to appear in the dedicated ‘microupdates’ feed. It’d probably also be integrated with twitter/identi.ca

For REAL microblogging with BuddyPress, I think a proper integration with StatusNet would be much more appropriate, seeing as this application can afford to thoroughly optimize microblogging (talking both performance and API) to the extent that it can be used with stand-alone applications.

As seen in other threads (and this one) I don’t think you can easily define a Social Network. People have different needs and desires when it comes to connecting with other people. Fundamentally, connecting is the only thing we’re all trying to do in one way or another.

Buddypress really is the kitchen sink. It offers everything you could want for a social network but without some careful planning for your specific community/target audience, BP could be a huge confusing mess.

This is what we’ve seen happening here on BP.org. Fundamentally, people want to come to this site to get information and help on BP. The forums are ideal for a support type of site with each thread being a question with answers, etc. That sort of interaction is difficult in an activity stream sort of model, especially if users aren’t fully immersed in the site. They come, ask their question, wait for an answer and leave until the next time they need help.

Groups are also handy in this sort of site as it allows people with similar interests to create a topic specific forum that doesn’t fit within the “main” forums. Instead of having one massive topic specific thread with many internal sub threads, they create their own group.

Activity streams are a huge mess on this sort of site and can add huge confusion. This isn’t really a socialization site where people are setting up their weekend plans or commenting on their buddy’s latest unfortunate event. That is where an activity stream comes in handy. I see it as being more for “personal connection” sites.

On BP.org, I don’t look at the main activity stream. I find it far to confusing and of little use. The Support index page is about the only place I go because I can see the latest questions and hot topics. It also shows me what public groups are currently getting a lot of traffic.

IMHO, the biggest missing piece in BP right now seems to be the connection between the activity stream and everything else. The activity stream needs to be more than just a content aggregator. Allowing people to comment on the activity stream implies that their response will be connected to the activity item. This is not currently the case and it is a huge usage nightmare.

Anyhoo, enough rambling. BP offers the tools but at the moment I can’t see many sites needing all of the features enabled.

My ‘social network’ in a nutshell: Give us the tools and we make the content.

@peterverkooijen @hnla I take the other side of your “little diff b/t blogs and forums” opinion. To me, a blog post is a significantly more “deliberate” piece of content . Blog posts do (and should) take much longer to write. They are thought pieces..with paragraphs/sections, and often media,etc You know what I’m talking about here. Forum Topics, however, are basically “here’s a topic/question I just thought of…discuss” On one of my prod site (1.1.3) I have people begging for group blog capabilities precisely because they are tired of using the Topic metaphor for all of their content. For ex, we have a group called the “12th Man Training Table” which centers on athlete nutrition. Folks want to post recipes for training means. Clearly, forum topics are the wrong vehicle. On the other hand, there are raging debates in that group that definitely belong in the forum construct..not a blog post with comments.

Can you use one or the other to suit your purposes? Sure. Is our use case different than yours? Perhaps. Just realize the probable best solution here is the existence of both with admins choosing what works best for them and driving on.

So Peter, please keep in mind that what you would do to BP would build a BP that works for Peter, but it’s not necessarily the only use case around, that’s all.

@lph2005 The student’s reaction and feedback will be, indeed, interesting. So far, what you have related is not inconsistent with other platform’s experiences. Students tend to avoid twitter for several reasons. It’s not a place for immature and “student-like” behavior given its democratic nature (why follow someone who just puts out useless drivel – see Sheep Throwing!) To really survive and thrive on Twitter you need to add value to someone’s world.

To get back on topic: BP tends to be better at constructing grown up environments that focus on quality content contributions. That could be why they don’t see much value in it. “Refusing to interact” is a strong characterization. Is that correct? It sounded like they were “told” to interact so it may not be a BP problem after all Tell us what they “hated” about the default theme. Tell us why switching to a static page that did nothing made activity go up (not intuitive)
Looking forward to your feedback and how it could enhance UI design here.

Slowly I am beginning to realize that Buddy press is not a straight-out-of-the-box solution. It is not like wordpress. In order to create a proper Buddypress community you really have to *develop* your community.

The negative with this is that the default install is confusing. Comments/updates in the activity stream, forum posts, comments on forum posts, comments on blog posts. Not only do you have different types of comments but you also have meta comments. No wonder things are confusing!

I am tempted to use an analogy of Linux vs Apple. You can do a lot with linux, but all the choices may lead to confusion and an unproductive environment. Apple on the other hand knows the importance of keeping things simple. The iPad is an example of this. It has less features than regular computers, and this makes it easier to use and less confusing. It does fewer things but it does them well.

So what has Apple and Linux got to do with Buddypress? I believe that Buddypress should have several options. (as it has today), but it should be easier to customize Buddypress in order to suit every individual communities` needs. You develop the site to suit you needs. Use what your community needs and remove everything else. Less noise and less confusion and more Apple like

As it is right now, in order to really customize the default install, you have to know PHP etc. This is good if you are a programmer, but unfortunately not all of us are. It seems to me like a lot of the BPusers are non-programmers who just want to add a social layer to their WP site. If Automattic wants to cater to these people, it will be necessary to make it easy to customize BP without having to dive into the code.

I suggest expanding on the options (toggles) in the Admin panel in order to customize the BP install more. That way you can really streamline your community experience.

Example:
– disable commenting for ALL activity-items at the homepage, or choose which one you want to disable. (forum/blogs etc)
– disable activity streams on groups (if admin wants to use forums instead.)
-Choose what is displayed in the activity feed. (Friend connections, blog posts etc)

What is apparent, just by reading the previous posts are that we all have different needs:

“Built-in forums are increasingly clashing with commenting on blogs and wires and the social networking structure. There is no reason to have old-fashioned forums in a next generation social network.”

vs

“I think it’s best to strip out sitewide activity stream as well as the groups activity stream. Force users to post content in forums and use their own profile activity stream to post a message to a specific user.”

People want different things, so why not let them have a choice. The new Bp.org is proof that all these different features are useful. They all have their advantages.(although it could use some more improvements to streamline the experience)

I agree with RAYs view:
“For groups, you can either go one way – embrace the activity stream or embrace the forums. It’s not the best thing to try and have it both ways. But this is a decision the BP admin should make (which it is right now). At the end of the day, BP gives you free reign to customize your community all you want.”

SUMMARY: My thoughts are that Buddypress needs an easier and more complete way of designing the community through the admin panel.

1.1.x (whatever it was) was great. I had an activity stream widget on the front page, so I could immediately see (well, once I’d deleted all the spam registrations) who’d been doing what and where, and I click to go and view the context and respond in the same place.

Now I get the feeling that BuddyPress is a platform for creating communities of BuddyPress users

Now there is no profile wire (I renamed it to ‘wall’ because nobody understood what a ‘wire’ is) – it was an absolutely fantastic way for me to greet new users and have a bit of open chat with them.

Now there is this @username nonsense which I don’t understand myself (I am not and never will be a twitter user) – where does that post go? It shows up as if it’s my (Facebook-style) status update. Someone can reply to it but I can’t reply to their reply. All continuity has been lost. I can see the advantage of AJAX replies in the activity stream, but not when it seems a random factor whether the post will appear only in the stream or whether it will appear at source..

The default theme is awful (1.1.x or whatever I had was beautiful, right out of the box) – It took me forever just to get the home page working with two widget columns (surely that wouldn’t have been hard to include in the release..?) but the profile page… ooooh no, it’s a disaster In 1.1.x I had no problems tweaking the profile page to make it do what I want… with 1.2 it defaults to the awful activity stream and I have to click through to profile on every user to see if he comes from xgGT54GRerju and works at Ox8iHghuf34 before I delete him as a spammer.

I started using BP because I needed to replace an ancient platform that I’d written myself ages ago, and I wanted something reliable and extensible because I just don’t have the free time to work on my site anymore. BP 1.1.x was exactly what I wanted (I tried Elgg and some other yucky, heaving nonsense before stumbling on the beautiful BP).

But now it’s just gone off on an utterly bizarre tangent and lost all its intuitive user- (and admin-)friendliness

I know it’s free and I know I’m moaning and not being productive but I really can’t write plugins or themes for BP (much as I would love to – I can’t even work out how to put the wire back) but I feel it’s very sad to see something so good (and so free) go so wrong

@bobs12 – The BuddyPress Backward Compatibility plugin https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-backwards-compatibility/ contains the old theme as well as the old wire code. You could install that plugin and have pretty much everything back the way it was.

Mike Pratt said 1 day ago:

“ @peterverkooijen @hnla I take the other side of your “little diff b/t blogs and forums” opinion. To me, a blog post is a significantly more “deliberate” piece of content … For ex, we have a group called the “12th Man Training Table” which centers on athlete nutrition. Folks want to post recipes for training means. Clearly, forum topics are the wrong vehicle. On the other hand, there are raging debates in that group that definitely belong in the forum construct..not a blog post with comments … So Peter, please keep in mind that what you would do to BP would build a BP that works for Peter, but it’s not necessarily the only use case around, that’s all.”

Mike Pratt, you miss the point. I’m talking about how the script and database is structured, not what you as a user should do with it. Functionally a blog post and a forum topic are the same thing; a piece of content that others can comment on. Similarly there only needs to be one way to store (threaded) comments. There is no need to duplicate that in forum thread, wires, etc. There is no need to have variations of posts and comments in different places in the database.

I’m talking about taking redundancies out, boiling down the architecture to the lowest number of necessary parts, less is more, keep it simple stupid. That does not mean you as a user will have less options. WP blog posts already provides many ways to make very different types of posts. In my P2-based custom theme I have started making a clear distinction between ‘status updates’ and ‘blog posts’ using categories. Apparently WP 3.0 will have more sophisticated hooks to do different things with different types of content.

Same for comments. There are already lots of different things you can do with comments, from IntenseDebate and other plugins to built-in threaded options, inline Ajax commenting and styling possibilities via your theme. Buddypress should leverage basic WordPress building blocks as much as possible instead of adding new database tables and third scripts like BBpress. Ultimately a lot of this is for the theme developers to develop. They could develop out-of-the-box themes for different use cases; schools, companies, sport clubs, etc. BP should focus on a solid core and flexible API.

Just stepping in with a recent observation that I am not sure how to address.

in looking aroudn and watching tweets & blog posts elsewhere about newcomers to the platform, someone somewhere started referring to it as a FORUM.

It is not.

And newcomers expecting a forum-like interface and usage are the ones I see struggling the most. Whether it’s being confused with bbpress (the name) in general, I dunno. But it might make a bit more sense and be less painful to regulars if we could start stressing that is is not a forum, it’s a social networking add-on for WordPress. Not separate (man, I am not impressed with the auto-install script…), and outside of anything that’s been done before.