Separate BP blog visibility from WPMU blog visibility (privacy)

[jivany]

WPMU provides two options for "blog visibility":

1) I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers
2) I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

Neither of these (to me) imply "make my blog invisible in Buddypress".

Many of the BP blog display options key off of this setting and disable such things as activity stream updates, "My Blogs" menu visibility, etc. for blogs that have been set to block search engines.

Possibly adding a check box to the "WPMU blog privacy" page that has something like:

[ ] Disable BuddyPress status updates for this blog.

Make it a check box as some users may want to have their blog picked up by the search engines but not have the BP activity stream updated.

This would also be useful for BP installations that are on a private intranet. We typically don't want to send out pings for any blog postings but we do want all parts of the site to be visible to users (or at least logged in users).

[andrea_r]

Just noting option one used to be followed by "and public listings around this site".

+1 for some way to keep google out, but allow sitewide display. (should be easy)

[boonebgorges]

At this time, BuddyPress generally does not put new settings into other blogs' settings around a WP Network installation. There are plugins out there that provide finer-grained blog privacy settings (​http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/more-privacy-options/ springs to mind), and I think that the modification of the blog privacy screen should stay in the realm of plugins.

However, there are some things that BP core could do to help make this happen better. See the attached patch: it filters the blog_public blog option that is checked before BP creates blog-related activity items. With such filters in place, two things could happen: (1) Admins could easily write a small filter that checks against a whitelist/blacklist of blogs, and (2) someone could write a small plugin (or an addon for something like More Privacy Options) that allows the blog owner to make those decisions in the Dashboard UI.

I think this is a fair compromise: it allows for the flexibility in question, without having BP inject options into what should be a vanilla WPMS installation. Thoughts?

[DJPaul]

Patch needs rewriting for current trunk

[SergeyBiryukov]

Refreshed for current trunk.

[boonebgorges]

(In [4115]) Puts filters on blog privacy in the blog activity functions so that plugins can manipulate better. Fixes #1536. Props boonebgorges and SergeyBiryukov