Previous activity for private groups not hidden from public stream

[rachelbaker]

I noticed this in BP trunk yesterday:
Creating a group - setting it as public...then later going back and changing the group to private doesn't hide previous activity from public stream.

Steps to reproduce:

• Create group with public setting.
• View activity update of group creation.
• Return to group and change privacy setting to private.
• Return to activity stream and previous group activity is still displayed (even if user is not logged in).

Is this intentional? If not, I am happy to submit a patch.

[boonebgorges]

Hi rachelbaker. This is more or less intentional. There are a couple reasons for it being this way:

1. Think about the converse: You have a private/hidden group, full of private content. Then the admin flips the switch to make the group public. It's not clear you'd want that old content to become public, at least not by default.
2. Activity is hidden by means of the hide_sitewide column in the activities table. You could theoretically change all of these values with a single SQL query, but it could be slow at scale. Moreover, a proper loop over the activity items would allow plugins to modify the behavior on an item-by-item basis; but looping would be much more process-intensive.

If we're going to consider something for BP core, I'd suggest that it should be in the form of a prompt. When you change a group's privacy level, you'd be asked (maybe on a subsequent screen?) whether you also want to change the visibility of all previous activity items, with an explanation of the potential privacy issues of doing so. This would default to 'NO' (the current behavior).

See also #2529, #3857

[DJPaul]

We're closing this ticket because it has not received any contribution or comments for at least two years. We have decided that it is better to close tickets that are good ideas, which have not gotten (or are unlikely to get) contributions, rather than keep things open indefinitely. This will help us share a more realistic roadmap for BuddyPress with you.

Everyone very much appreciates the time and effort that you spent sharing your idea with us. On behalf of the entire BuddyPress team, thank you.

If you feel strongly that this enhancement should still be added to BuddyPress, and you are able to contribute effort towards it, we encourage you to re-open the ticket, or start a discussion about it in our Slack channel. Please consider that time has proven that good ideas without contributions do not get built.

For more information, see ​https://bpdevel.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/our-awaiting-contributions-milestone-contains/
or find us on Slack, in the #buddypress channel: ​https://make.wordpress.org/chat/