Once installed and activated, BuddyPress Activity Privacy adds the following privacy controls to the post update box for members:

• Anyone
• Logged In Users
• My Friends
• Admin Only
• Only Me

Why anyone would select the “only me” option, I can only guess. Perhaps it’s a decent alternative for those who like to vent on social networks. “My Friends” privacy option puts the BuddyPress core friends component to good use, making it worthwhile for users to send and accept friend requests.

Certain privacy controls are component-dependent. For example, the “Friends Only” privacy option in the dropdown will not show up unless you have the Friends component activated in the BuddyPress settings panel.

When posting within a group the group-specific privacy options will be added to the dropdown, inlcluding:

• My Friends in a Group
• Group Members
• Group Moderators
• Group Admins

In the past, the lack of privacy controls has turned many people off to using BuddyPress. This new plugin should help to alleviate some of those concerns, since most of the content flows through the activity stream and group components. I’ve tested the various privacy controls and they all seem to work just as advertised. The BuddyPress Activity Privacy plugin is one I would recommend for any BuddyPress site. It gives each member multiple privacy options on activity posts and should encourage more confident participation on your social network.

Related posts:

1. A Look at the Present and Future of the BuddyPress Privacy Component Jeff Sayre announced today that BP Privacy v1.0-RC1 is now...
2. Download the New BuddyPress Profile Privacy Plugin Need basic profile privacy for BuddyPress? This free plugin has...
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Before you throw your keyboard and delete your whole BuddyPress site, you should know that there are proven ways to reduce, if not eliminate, BuddyPress spam.

How Spam Usually Shows Up On BuddyPress Sites

There are three places where you’ll notice BuddyPress spammers:

• BuddyPress Members Directory or Dashboard Users Page
• Activity Stream
• Private Messages

The first place you’re likely to notice BuddyPress spam is in the activity stream. If spambots get past your registration form, they will usually post paragraph-length activity updates for embarrassing products that you probably don’t want advertised to your members.

Besides spamming the activity feed, the bots also like to get into your forums and private messaging inboxes. A spam message from a bot gives your members a bad impression of your community and can even cause members to delete their accounts.

10 Spam Killing Solutions for BuddyPress

Take heart! You’re not helpless against the spam bots. There are a number of ways that you can stop these spammers in their tracks. BuddyPress spam solutions can be divided into two main categories:

• Registration Plugins – Solutions that help keep spammers from registering
• Spam Management – Plugins for helping after spammers have already registered

By far, the best way to keep spam at bay is to stop the spammers at the door. That’s why many plugin developers have focused their efforts on creating plugins that stop spam at registration. We’re going to examine the pros and cons of each.

1. BuddyPress Security Check

Pros:
A math question is quick and easy. It’s also not nearly as annoying and frustrating as a CAPTCHA. Installation is easy and there are no options to configure. The plugin also does not store any values in the database.

Cons:
It slows down the registration process, though only by a few seconds.

2. Spam Destroyer

Spam Destroyer is an experimental plugin by Ryan Hellyer for blocking spammers from bbPress, BuddyPress and multisite registrations. The unique thing about this plugin is that it’s totally unobtrusive. It doesn’t add anything to your signup form. It checks for registration evilness in the background so as not to disturb your visitors.

Pros: No settings to mess with – install, activate and you’ll be blocking spam. No extra fields are added to the registration form. It has added protection against comment spam.

Cons: This plugin is not compatible with Jetpack, so if you’re using Jetpack for comments you’ll need to find a different spam plugin.

3. BuddyPress reCAPTCHA

Pros: CAPTCHAs are fairly difficult for bots to hijack and are effective at preventing spam.

Cons: A CAPTCHA is a cumbersome addition to the registration form and can be frustrating to some users. Setup and configuration requires editing the ‘bp-recaptcha.php’ file. It’s not user-friendly for those who are not familiar with FTP.

4. WangGuard

Despite its unfortunate name, WangGuard is a powerful and highly-rated plugin for stopping registration spam. It has a number of built-in measures to combat BuddyPress spam. This plugin is associated with a web service that helps to protect your site from sploggers, spam users, unwanted users and Black Hat SEO.

Here’s an example of WangGuard blocking blots on attempting to register:

It also includes the ability for users to report one another’s posts in the activity stream. This helps admins stay on top of spam and objectionable content in the activity stream in case a spammer has managed to get past registration.

Pros: WangGuard provides extra features for managing spammers if they’ve already gotten through. It provides statistics for tracking how many spammers have been blocked. You can easily customize the plugin’s settings from the control panel.

Cons: It requires API Keys to set up and configure. The service is only free if you have 500 or fewer registrations per day. WangGuard may provide more features than many small BuddyPress sites require.

5. Anti-Splog

• Limiting the number of signups per IP per 24 hours
• Human tests – answering random user defined questions, picking the cat pics, or reCAPTCHA.
• Pattern Matching – Checking site domains, titles, or usernames against your defined set of regular expressions.

Pros: Provides multiple options to choose from for signup form protection.

Cons: Anti-Splog does not work unless you’re running multisite. It also does not yet protect against spam entries in status updates, forums, activity streams.

6. BuddyPress Honeypot

Pros: BuddyPress Honeypot is completely unobtrusive and doesn’t add anything extra to the registration form.

Cons: It’s not available in the WordPress repository so it may be difficult to get plugin updates.

7. Ban Hammer

Pros: Ban Hammer doesn’t add anything new to the registration form and doesn’t inconvenience your visitors.

Cons: The customizable error message doesn’t always work with BuddyPress, but the basic ban hammer functionality works just fine.

8. BP Invitation

Pros: No spammer bots can possibly get through unless they have a way of guessing the registration code.

Cons: This solution does not work for every BuddyPress community. Potential registrants must already have the code in order to get in, so it essentially closes off your registration to those who have just discovered your site.

9. Akismet

Akismet? A BuddyPress plugin? Yes, indeed. Akismet can be used to help keep BuddyPress activity spam under control. BuddyPress 1.6 introduced activity management with Akismet integration. When posts are marked as spam by Akismet, you’ll be able to see them when you filter for spam under the Activity menu in the dashboard.

Pros: If you’re already using Akismet to combat comment spam, you’ll get the same high level of protection in the activity stream.

Cons: It requires an API key and connection to WordPress.com. Usually this is free but there is a fee for commercial use.

10. Spam Link Plugin

• Adds the “Mark as spammer” link back to the admin bar
• Adds a “Spammer” button to the activity stream entry meta row

Pros: Saves you time from having to search for the user in the dashboard in order to mark as spam and delete.

Cons: The plugin isn’t in the repository, so it might be difficult to get updates.

The only sure-fire way to make sure you don’t get any BuddyPress spam is to close off your site’s registration completely, but that would be completely counterproductive for most BuddyPress social networks where the idea is to grow membership.

The important thing to remember is that there is no one catch-all solution for BuddyPress spam. You may even need to do a combination of these measures in order to achieve full control over the spambots. Every BuddyPress site attracts different kinds of spammers and what works on one site may not work on another. Give a few of these proven plugins a try and you’ll discover what works for you.

Know any other ways to stop BuddyPress spam? We’d love to hear them in the comments.

photo credit: Yet another bedroom B-side by coba, on Flickr
photo credit: Henghwee! :D cc
photo credit: Josh Kenzer cc

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Get A Curated List of The Best BuddyPress Plugins From WordPress.org

There’s a new tool that helps to answer the question “Which BudydPress plugins should I use?” BuddyPlug is a brand new plugin from @modemlooper that provides you with a curated list of BuddyPress plugins in the same menu where you add new WordPress plugins.

The list is curated by the community and there are currently 83 plugins that have been included.

This is not to say that you should never install a plugin that doesn’t appear in this curated list. I would recommend using this as a guide or to help you narrow down options when there are multiple plugins that do the same thing.

BuddyPlug is especially useful if you’re new to BuddyPress and have no idea which plugins are quality and which you may want to avoid. Please be advised that the plugin does not come with a guarantee of any kind and is not meant to replace your own testing and research.

Of course, if you want complete peace of mind, you’ll want to check out our BuddyPress plugins at WPMU DEV. All of our plugins are guaranteed to be updated for the latest version of WordPress and BuddyPress the very same day of any new release. Developing with BuddyPress in mind doesn’t happen as an afterthought. When you launch your BuddyPress site, make sure you’re locked in with quality plugins – whether they are from a commercial provider or the wordpress.org repository. Installing BuddyPlug is just one more way that you can help to make sure your site will be ready for future updates.

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Once installed, this plugin causes a click on the “Add Friend” button to pop up a little message window, enabling a user to send a message along with the friendship request.

Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action:

A message can remind acquaintances of where they met, bring to memory a personal connection or describe two members’ connection to a friend of a friend. Little tweaks like this can inspire more communication and friendship throughout your community. Many thanks to Brajesh for creating this plugin. Download BuddyPress Extended Friendship Request for free from the WordPress plugin repository.

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Although it includes “dislike” in the title, the plugin operates with more of a ‘Like’ and ‘Unlike’ functionality. It doesn’t actually aggregate the total number of dislikes but rather subtracts from the existing likes. In this way it’s not a total commitment to the ‘disliking’ style functionality.

Here’s how it works:

• Simultaneous like and unlike/dislike buttons are added to activity stream items side by side. Users can either click ‘like’ or an ‘unlike’/'dislike’ which are obviously mutually exclusive.
• Once a user has liked an activity item he can only unlike it and vice-versa

Below you can see the default appearance of the like/unlike buttons on the default BuddyPress theme:

Here’s an example of an activity stream item that has been liked:

Styling the plugin is fairly easy, as the plugin it includes its own stylesheet and icons for like/dislike buttons under the ‘_inc’ folder.

Please note that if you are hoping to preserve the total number of likes and aggregate dislikes, this is not the plugin you’re looking for. The BuddyPress Like Dislike plugin performs more of a balancing functionality between likes and unlikes.

The BuddyPress Like Dislike plugin is not yet available from the WordPress plugin repository, but it is still a free download. Follow the plugin author, @webdwall, on Twitter for all the latest updates. Also, make sure to check out his other recent plugin release that adds attachments to BuddyPress private messages.

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Here’s what your messaging compose screen will look like with attachments allowed:

Attachments are then shown on the recipient’s message screen:

I tested the message attachments and they work as advertised. However, you will need to make sure to add the allowed file types in the settings page before users will be allowed to attach files. The BuddyPress Message Attachment plugin is available for free from the WordPress plugin repository. Add it to your community to give your members an expanded way to communicate with one another through private messages.

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Stephanie Leary has developed a plugin that does two things to help you quickly combat spam on your BuddyPress site:

• Adds the “Mark as spammer” link back to the admin bar
• Adds a “Spammer” button to the activity stream entry meta row

Below is the new “Spammer” button that lets you easily mark a user as a spammer from the activity stream, which is where you most often become aware of spammers having infiltrated your community:

The BuddyPress Spam Link plugin is currently available for download from github. Stephanie is considering adding it to the WordPress repository, depending on how discussion shapes up regarding this related ticket in trac.

How to Use the BuddyPress Spam Link Plugin

Download the buddypress-spam-link.php file and upload it to your plugins folder. Alternately you can copy the code from that file and add it to your bp-custom.php file. However, I’d recommend keeping it as a separate plugin for the sake of troubleshooting and updating.

Killing BuddyPress spam accounts goes much faster with the BuddyPress Spam Link plugin installed. Many thanks to Stephanie Leary for making it available to the community on github. This plugin is a must-have for BuddyPress community managers who want to be able to quickly combat spam as soon as it’s reported.

photo credit: freezelight via photopin cc

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Now you can show BuddyPress content anywhere on your site using simple shortcodes. Bowe Codes is a free plugin that allows BuddyPress users to display BuddyPress content wherever they can copy and paste a shortCode.

Bowe Codes currently has ten available ShortCodes :

• Member / Members
• Group / Groups
• My Friends / My Groups
• My Messages
• Multisite Blogs / Multisite Posts

As you can see, Bowe Codes comes with enough built in flexibility to allow you to display single users (great if you want to feature one of your users each month), single groups or blogs within your multisite network.

This is the perfect solution for making it simple for your users to find all the content on your BuddyPress site without having to spend time reconstructing your navigation menus. Just choose the content you want to display, choose the exact page you want to display it on, copy and paste the related ShortCode into that page and the content displays exactly you wish.

Try it out.

Bowe Codes

-Seth C

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Buddypress Xprofile Custom Fields Type is a brand new extension that adds more custom fields type to extended profiles. It includes the following commonly used field types:

• Add Birthdate field.
• Add Email field (HTML5).
• Add Web field (HTML5).
• Add Datepicker field (HTML5).

After installing the plugin you’ll see more options when selecting the the profile field type under Users > Profile Fields > Add New Field:

On the front end you’ll see a nice birth date dropdown box within user profiles:

Here’s an example of the date picker field type included with the plugin:

You can use your theme to style this up however you like. As you can see, it’s much more convenient to select a date this way, rather than using the traditional dropdowns, especially if it’s a date in the near future. Little additions like these will go a long way in helping to make your BuddyPress social network easier to use and more professional. I’ve tested the Buddypress Xprofile Custom Fields Type plugin and I’d recommend it for any community with with a need for more varied profile field types. Download it for free from the WordPress plugin repository or directly through your dashboard.

Want more custom field types? Explore the code of this plugin and use it as a roadmap for creating your own. Alternatively, you can email the plugin’s developer at info@atallos.com to make a request or suggestion.

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Please note that this is not a plugin you simply install and activate. You’ll have to write an accompanying plugin to get it to work. You can create the questions using the plugin’s pig_register_question() function. There are examples in the plugin’s notes that you can follow to write your own plugin. Who knows? Maybe you’ll go on to create a few BuddyPress plugins of your own if you enjoy this one. Download the BuddyPig plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.

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