My BuddyPress function Invite Anyone has always been misleadingly named. It expanded on BuddyPress’s default setup, which only allows members to send group invitations to people who they’re friends with, by allowing individuals to send invitations to anyone in the entire installation. This only qualifies as inviting anyone on a, er, very austere ontology of personhood. The new version of Invite Anyone, version 0.4, adds a new tab to BuddyPress profile tabs that allows invitation both to groups and to the site in general via email. It’s a big update, both in terms of features and in terms of sheer code (pretty sure the number of lines of code is close to triple what it was before).
And now you know what I did on my spring break.
If you know what’s good for you, you will Check It Out.
So far this has been a very sweet update to this plugin – although my site is not live yet – I’ve been waiting for this one for ages. 🙂
Excellent, iSimone!!
Thanks Boone for the great plugin. Once question…seems I have too many.
If you mark a user as a spammer, they are still visible when you send group invites.
Anton, I welcome your questions 🙂
I’ll fix this on the next rev of the plugin. Thanks for the feedback.
>If you know what’s good for you, you will Check It Out.
I know what’s good for me and I’ll *definitely* check it out.
On another tack I’m thinking of asking a student programmer to work on a BP plugin : Group Quorum. Basically, you have to have three (or n) people (Friends presumably) commit to joining a group before it can be created. This should slow down the proliferation of junk groups.
Cool idea. Technically, it might be easiest to have the groups actually created as they usually are, but to give all new groups a piece of metadata called “probationary” or something like that. Then, wherever groups are listed with bp_has_groups, filter for that piece of metadata and don’t show groups that have it. The probationary flag would then be removed on the third group join, or whatever.
Or, let junk groups proliferate in a wide, open breeding ground (why stifle enthusiasm?), but create a plugin that allows groups to merge easily to form stronger joint entities. The plugin could include some kind of game-like diplomatic functionality where one group makes a sort of overture/proposal to merge with another group, which the second group has to accept in order for the merge to take place.
That’s an interesting idea, Matt.
I get the sense that the problem is that groups proliferate but are never active. The problem with that is that it clogs up the directory, so that people who are browsing around the site, looking for activity, see a bunch of inactive, unpopulated groups and figure that the site isn’t very exciting.
Your suggestion for group combination might solve part of the problem. But I think the real answer is to provide the right kinds of filters, and the right default filters, so that people browsing around the site are more likely to see the active groups than the dead groups. That’s not to say that you should hide dead groups altogether (though a plugin like Mark’s would effectively do that, and I can see an argument for doing so on a provisional basis), but that you should make them not quite as easy to find as the active groups.
R-A-Y on the buddypress forums suggested I bring this to your attention:
http://buddypress.org/forums/topic/how-can-a-user-nominate-or-invite-users-wo-open-registration
Basically the idea is a way to trace who invited a user. So that you can link back the referring user in the tree. (Figure it might also help encourage some responsibility.)