A Well Deserved One Star

  • Look, it’s ok for free. But this is the NUMBER 1 social plugin. That should mean something. Obviously it doesn’t to buddy press. They really should make this a private plugin not open source, make it premium, so that the developers actually take it serious.

    Does it get the job done? Sure. Does it do it well? Hardly.

    This plugin has easily become the biggest headache out of any plugin I’ve installed. I’d rec’m Ultimate Member or some other premium UM plugin. Yes, they’re not free, but it’s not worth the headache.

    BuddyPress is basically a car that’s made up of scrap parts. Because of its popularity, there’s a lot of add-ons. But that’s kind’ve the problem, you’re going to need to piece it together from stuff you found at a garage sale, instead of one nice bundle all in one place.

    Next, the support SUCKS. Their forum is dead, or very slow to respond, if ever. You can tell apathy and neglect rules the day there. There is no incentive to help. The moderators there are the typical IT “pros”. Condescending, know it alls, tech speak, and not user friendly. I call these people idiot savants. They are good at math & programming type things, but suck at seeing the bigger picture (marketing, UX, etc). They are like stackoverflow.com. More interested in sounding smart or trying to preach some petty nonsense, than ACTUALLY HELPING their consumers.

    Next, there’s the UI/UX. BuddyPress layout is stuck in 2009. There’s been minimal updates to their UI. If you want to see just how ugly BuddyPress is relatively, just see other plugins like Ultimate Member. Then you’ll realize BP’s UI is far behind.

    Worst of all, YOU CANT DEACTIVATE & DELETE IT WITHOUT HEADACHES!! I am trying to uninstall it right now and it is throwing me the white screen of death. Following the troubleshooting steps did not work. Support is non existent.

    I’ve never seen a more neglected popular (hundreds of thousands of downloads) wordpress plugin, in a multitude of areas (support, UI, code, etc). Do yourself a favor and don’t install, it creates more headaches than solutions, I’ve wasted WAY too much time and lost revenue due to this very un-well thought out plugin.

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  • Your pint about the native UI is true, but like everything in Buddypress you can overwrite it

    Your point about support is likewise true, but the guys are volunteers

    Every other point is complete bullshit. Buddypress is vastly superior in every other way to paid social networking plugins

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by shawfactor.
    Thread Starter zo1234

    (@zo1234)

    Sure if you are a PHP wizard or want to scroll through their non user friendly documentation or support, you can “customize” Buddy Press. And the amount of time dedicated to that, both researching and implementing, I’m sure is what EVERY person who installs this plugin wants to be doing with their time to grow their site.

    I’m literally going to plunk down $300 (Ultimate Member) just for User Management, because I know I get plenty of features in one neat bundle. I don’t have to put together scrap parts to build the whole, while dealing with crappy support and crappy UI. It’s now worth it to me to do it that way to avoid the headaches of buddy press.

    Please elaborate how my other points are “bullshit” and how it’s better than other UM plugins on the things that actually matter.

    Also no other plugin gives me a white screen when trying to delete it! I can’t even get rid of this crap without headaches. It’s an endless troll plugin.

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