BuddyPress WordPress plugin to remove profile links

If you use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin you might have noticed that some random links are automatically generated for text in your profile fields.

These links help visitors search for the same keywords in other profiles, but there doesn't seem to be a setting to switch this off, or to manage the links so that only useful keywords become links.

2 Feb, 2013

If you use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin, you might have noticed that some spurious links are automatically generated for text in your profile fields. These links help visitors search for the same keywords in other profiles, but there doesn’t seem to be a setting to switch this off or to manage the links so that only useful keywords become links.

As an example, here’s some link text that BuddyPress added to my own profile on one of my websites.

BuddyPress profile screenshot

After a look around BuddyPress itself and a search on the web, I came across the ‘Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress’ plugin. As well as allowing you to remove the random links from your profile fields, it also allows your users to put square brackets around words in their profile fields that they would like turned into links. The plugin is in the WordPress repository, although it hasn’t been maintained recently, so could have some compatibility issues. It’s worth trying, though.

Screenshot of how to remove random BuddyPress profile links

To use this plugin, simply install it on your site and activate it. However, to customise it to remove links from your profile fields you will need to edit one of the plugin files. The file is called custom-profile-filters-for-buddypress.php and it lives in the plugin folder. Edit the file by using FTP and add a comma-separated list of the fields that you want links removed from.

Snapshot of php code to edit BuddyPress plugin

One of the downsides of using this plugin is that it does remove other formatting that users might have added to their profile fields too. For example, the line breaks in the example above.

2 Comments

  1. wmasat

    I have a buddypress with a theme(youzify), I want to display activitys posts randomly on home page, I want posts to be displayed randomly, not in chronological order
    anyone knows any code or method for that

    Reply
    • Martin Jarvis

      I don’t think this can be done using plugin / theme options. However, there is a suggestion here (https://buddypress.org/support/topic/sorting-activity-stream/). If you look at the last entry on that post they suggest adding some code to your functions.php (or whatever way you have to add code snippets in your website). I think that you will need to change the …

      ORDER BY FIELD(id,’.$in_items.’)

      with something like…

      ORDER BY RAND().’)

      but you will need to experiment with that.

      Sorry I cannot help you more with this, but perhaps somebody else may comment.

      Reply

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