Let your users make friend connections so they can track the activity each other, and focus on the people they care about the most.
– @tdempsey2012 Private Messages can only be sent to and received by Friends
– Friends who are Group Admins can send invitations to friends to join the group created.
– All those who accepted your friendship request show up in the Friends tab of your Profile page and you can check out the activities of your friends.
– Of course, if you’re Super Admin, you don’t need to be friending everybody to send messages to one and all.
@mercime I am using the latest versions of WP and BP and as you stated above `”Private Messages can only be sent to and received by Friends.”` I have found on my test server a possible bug if this is supposed to be the way it functions as stated above. The ajax auto fill in for the User/Friends name will work if you are friends, however it does not work if your not friends, but if you manually type in the users name even if your not friends the private message still goes through and is delivered to the person you are not friends with. Keep in mind these test users are subscribers only and not admins, so is this a possible bug? Thanks!
@shawn38 Apologies, no bug at all. It’s my bad, I forgot I have BuddyPress Message Privacy Plugin installed in all sites ever since There’s a free https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-private-message-for-friends-only/ but it needs to be updated for current BP version.
@mercime Hey no problem. Just out of curiosity even though that plugin has not been updated, do you know if it works with the current versions of WP and BP? I know sometimes it just a matter of testing with the current versions and updating the readme.txt in the plugin to reflect it will work with them. Thanks again.
@tdempsey2012 if @mercime confirms the questions above this may help give a you a reason for friends on your site. Also you may want to check out the plugin BP FriendPress https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/buddypress-friendpress.zip . It allows you to show your friends and your own activity in the activity stream for your users like facebook does. The admin still see’s sitewide activity.
Edit:
@mercime @r-a-y @tdempsey2012 I just tested r-a-y’s plugin on my test server with the latest versions of WP and BP and its working as it should. Subscribers get denied sending a private message if they are not friends, and the admin can send a private message to anyone regardless of friendship. Is there a chance of getting @r-a-y to update the repository to reflect this plugin is still valid for the current versions of WP & BP? Thanks!
shawn38 thanks for the info was wondering how that worked with current version but hadn’t had the time to test myself
@mercime i have this plugin installed with current BP/WP it seems to be working just fine just curious if there were any issues that you were aware of that i was not.
@ubernaut None that I know of. It’s just natural on my part to warn that a plugin I posted about in this forum has not been updated for some time based on the information on plugin repo page 
