All the credit for this plugin goes to Rich Fuller and is entirely based on his tutorial for hacking BuddyPress to remove non-friend updates from the activity stream. I simply packaged it up and made it a plugin, because I believe that it is an extremely useful modification to BuddyPress from a community-building perspective, and I wanted it to be easily available to whoever wants it.
Removing non-friend updates from the activity stream makes sense for a number of reasons. It builds meaningful relationships between community members who have chosen to be friends. Instead of seeing all updates for all users of the community, the user will be better able to keep up with his friends by seeing only their updates, which are probably of greater interest to him. This will enrich the user’s experience on your site far more than if you throw updates from all members at him. For a very active BuddyPress community, all updates can be simply too much information to process and can cause the user to devalue your site.
The Friends-Only Activity Stream plugin will limit the activity stream for general users to postings from their friends only. The admin user will see all activities, regardless of friendship. This plugin removes activity stream postings from non-friends all together with the exception of the admin and public groups. Right now WPMU.org is the only place you can download it. It should also be available in the WordPress.org repo soon. Simply install it, activate it, and it works! Many thanks to Rich Fuller for his work on this handy hack.
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March 11, 2010 
ahh brilliant plugin thanks!
This way people dont have to see the spam signups :P
awesome! guess i’ll keep on posting the nifty little tweaks and hacks :P
Pingback: BuddyPress hack: remove non-friend updates from the activity stream | the rich! ramblings
I’m confused. The default activity stream has a link to sort the stream by “Friends” updates only. What does this do differently?
@Ted
Hi! at the homepage, if you setted to display the activity stream instead of the latest blog posts, you’ll see everyone’s updates. The filter you are talking about is at the user’s profile page (at least in the latest versions of BP) ;)
So this plugin is great then to show only the user’s friends updates :)
Thanx again. Would be great if you could share some thoughts on re-directing to activity stream upon login. There was a plugin that sends you to profile, but that does not make a whole lot of sense to go back to your profile.
Excellent, can it be user-activated ? I mean, having a checkbox on each user’s profile so THEY are the ones who decide to enable it or not ?
It’s not showing the user’s own updates though, on the activity page… only shows friend’s updates :(
or maybe this is only happening to me?
Any ideas?
love those plugins, thank you!
Hello.
It’s happening to me the same as Celso. It ONLY shows friends updates, but not the own ones. This includes comments on its, so when a user updates his state and gets comments on it, he can’t read them.
Anyone has a solution?
Great hack, anyway.
Thanks!
Hi, tried to install the plugin and have same problem as mentioned above by Celso & Federico.
I undertstand one can get it working with some modifications, can you please help with a hack?
I also need activity not to show to non-friends and have own & freinds posts on the same page / stream (using the plugin is unfortunatelly blocking own posts)
Thank you!