[Wolfgang Hoeschele]

Hello,

I have two questions regarding member registration that are still unresolved.

1) When members enter their first and last names as username, the Commons in a Box theme places a dash in between first and last name instead of a space (i.e., “John-Doe” instead of “John Doe”). This causes considerable trouble for many new members. Is there a way to allow the empty space? I do know that other WordPress sites do allow an empty space, but in ours it’s not happening.

2) What exactly does a new member need to do in order to show up in the list of active members? Oddly enough, some people who have done nothing other than get registered immediately showed up in the members list that is visible to all members, but others show up only in our WangGuard list or the dashboard, which are visible only to administrators. I want to be able to tell new members exactly what they need to do in order to be visible to other members.

All of this pertains to Commons Abundance Network, http://commonsabundance.net.

Also thank you for answers already given in the past!

Wolfgang

[Wolfgang Hoeschele]

Hello,

I am still waiting for a reply on these questions.

Note regarding point 2: I have now contacted the “invisible” members and encouraged them to do things such as upload an avatar and to “friend” people, and those who have responded have become visible, “active” members as a result. However, I’d still like to know exactly what it takes to be featured on the list of active members.

Wolfgang

[Scott Voth]

Hi Wolfgang –

• for number 1 – this is something BuddyPress does automatically.  You might consider customizing your registration process to prohibit new members from having any spaces in the USERNAME field.  A lot of BuddyPress sites I’ve seen do this to avoid the issue you mention.  I noticed one topic on BuddyPress.org that relates to this http://buddypress.org/support/topic/filtering-login-username-to-allow-spaces/  You might want to touch base with “aaclayton” to see if he has any updates.  If you want to customize your registration page – maybe look around for a BuddyPress Registration plugin – or other members here might have suggestions for one that works well.
• for number 2 – I believe a member is considered active once they actually do something on the site other than just registering.  Before that they are considered passive members.

[Ray]

1) This is a known oversight in BuddyPress. BuddyPress doesn’t like spaces in usernames and automatically converts them to dashes without really documenting this to users on the registration page.

The good news is BuddyPress 1.8 makes the registration error messages a little clearer, so that will address this issue once that is released in a month.

2) Scott is right to mention that a new member usually needs to login so they have generated some activity.  Once that happens, they will usually show up in the member directory and widgets.

This does sound odd though:

Oddly enough, some people who have done nothing other than get registered immediately showed up in the members list that is visible to all members,

Sounds like a bug. Looks like BuddyPress will need to address this so new users need to generate some activity before they show up.

[Wolfgang Hoeschele]

Thanks for the replies!

I’m glad that the next update of Buddypress is slated to make this issue about the hyphen clearer – we’ve had some frustrated new registrants, and now I always make clear to people when I invite them that they have to remember this issue, but it will be nice if I don’t need to do that anymore!

Some people immediately showing up as active members occurred with some of the sign-ups by “members” whom I have since reported as sploggers and deleted (who put meaningless combinations of letters into the registration fields), but also with a couple of people of whom I am confident that they are real people, but who didn’t upload an avatar or did anything more than register. So a bit more consistency would indeed be useful here.

[Author]

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