Social Links in Profile problem

[Anton]

I just bought this theme today and have been playing around with it for hours — it has so many great features, and it’s just a really beautiful theme overall! I have very few complaints, but I wanted to point a major one I had:

SOCIAL LINKS IN PROFILE (below the Base info):
I feel like this is one of the weakest additions to this theme, and it just seems really poorly thought out considering how well done everything else is! Here are my beefs:

• ALL of the fields show up no matter what, even if you don’t fill them all out. Which means if you’ve only entered Facebook details, it will list a bunch of empty fields, and only one of them with a URL. That just makes it look really sloppy and unprofessional. It should work where ONLY the fields with info in them should are displayed!
• There should be an option for admins to hide certain social links from even being an option to be filled out. I’m currently building a site where some of these fields, especially Pinterest, really don’t belong at all. By having completely unnecessary social sites that really shouldn’t be there due to the subject matter of the site in question, it makes it seem like the webmasters don’t have a clue to what they’re doing.
• I’m noticing that the URL’s don’t seem to even show up if you start them with just “www” — apparently there needs to be “http://” at the beginning of them. However there’s no prompt that tells you to put that there (actually, that part should be auto-displayed anyway — that should be an easy thing to code)
• The URL’s don’t even become hyperlinks! So someone has to copy and paste them into a new browser window to even visit that person’s social profile. That just seems really silly to me.

I was also going to say that there should be a way for admins to add OTHER social profile links that aren’t listed in the theme — but then I realized you guys have it set up so that these specific links also materialize as button links next to a member’s avatar (as shown in your demos), and adding new social sites would mess that up.

However, that leads me to my other issue…
…those buttons aren’t even showing up for me! Am I doing something wrong there for them not to show up?

I really hope the social links in the profile become more useful and flexible in future updates. Right now I’m trying everything I can to try and hide them in the meantime…

[Anonymous]

@antonkawasaki sounds like this support topic (https://www.buddyboss.com/support-forums/topic/hiding-the-social-section-in-profile/) is something that would be useful for now.

[Anton]

Sweet – thanks @ryanmaler! That definitely helps for now…

[Anton]

Even though I’ve managed to hide the social links on the bottom of the profile page, I still have the remaining two issues:

• The “Edit Profile” view contains options to fill in your social media links, but I’d really like to remove entirely (or at least hide) some of them. Actually my real preference is to change them to some other social links not listed…but I’ll take removing/hiding them for now.
• The circular icon buttons are not showing up below the member’s names. Although I just discovered that the SHADOW behind them IS showing (I didn’t see them at first because I had a dark background, but now with a lighter background they appear). Just not the actual icons… (see attached). Any clue as to why this may be happening?

Any help with either of the above would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!!

[Alyssa]

@antonkawasaki Welcome to the BuddyBoss community!
1) All social media fields should NOT show up empty automatically. It is possible there is a plugin conflicting or your hosting provider. 1a) Try disabling all plugins and check if you still have the issue. 1b) Who is your hosting provider?

2) I have sent a request to the developers to be able to disable individual social media links.

3) What do you mean URLs don’t show up? Are you certain this is a theme issue versus a BuddyPress issue?

4) URLs should become hyperlinks but this is not a theme issue, this is a BuddyPress issue. And I’m fairly certain the require http or https to link properly via BuddyPress design.

5) To hide social links in profile add this to your child theme custom.css file:
.btn-group.social{display:none;}

6) See item 1

[Anton]

Hiya @tjchester. Thanks for the reply!
To answer:

1). I DID disable all plugins. The profile fields still appear (but are empty), even if no URL has been provided. Also, I am working on the site locally, so it’s not a host provider that’s a problem. It occurred to me that I may not be explaining myself well, so I’ll try again. I just went to the Boss demo site and the sample profile page there has the SAME issue that I’m talking about! Please see the attached photo for reference. As you’ll see from the #1, there are blank spaces when a URL is not provided. So even if you just enter ONE URL, all the other fields still show up (empty). This just doesn’t look good. It should be written so that ONLY fields that have URL’s written in them appear.

2). Thank you!! This will be very useful to many, I bet.

3). What I meant here is…if I’m editing my profile, and I just put “www.facebook.com/mylink” (without “http://”) in the Facebook section and save the changes, it won’t actually accept the changes. If I put “http://www.facebook.com/mylink”, however, THEN it will appear. Lots of people write in URL’s without the “http://” part of it, but there’s no indication that you actually NEED to do it here or it won’t appear. There should either be a prompt that tells people to include the “http://” part, or it should be pre-loaded text there already…

4). Even with the “http://” added (as stated above, they HAVE to be added or they won’t appear), these do NOT become hyperlinks. This isn’t the case in your demo either (also shown in attached). I’m not sure how this could be a BuddyPress issue. Shouldn’t there be a way to make these actual, workable, hyperlinks? It seems silly to offer links, but people have to cut and paste them in order make any use of them. This is why I started this thread to begin with — the social links on the bottom seem very poorly thought-out due to all the issues I’m addressing.

5). The CSS snippet you gave me here is for hiding the white social link circles that appear under a member’s name. But that’s not actually what I was meaning here!! Sorry again, if I’m not explaining myself well. I’ll try again: What I meant was… even if I HIDE the social links from appearing at the BOTTOM of profiles (or the white buttons near the name for that matter), the OPTIONS to fill in the URL’s for said profiles still appear when you click “Edit Profile.” From what you said in point #2, it sounds like you’ve sent a request to the dev to have the option to disable individual social media links — that would solve this issue!! (In both profile view and “edit” view).

6). As I mentioned, disabling plugins didn’t help. I AM working on this locally, and not on a host — but that shouldn’t be an issue, I don’t think? As you can see from the attached photo in my post above, the SHADOWS of the buttons are appearing, but not the buttons themselves. It looks like they should be coming from the “social-iconset.svg” file, which IS there in the Boss images folder. I’m just not sure why they aren’t actually appearing where they should be…. 🙁

[Anton]

UPDATE on item #6: So it looks like the white social button icons aren’t showing up for me because I’m building in a local environment on my computer using Safari. They show up if the site is online in Safari (or even offline in Chrome) — just not offline in Safari. Sorry for any confusion, but at least that’s resolved — it’s a Safari problem, not a theme one.

Still hope the theme devs can work do something regarding items #1-5 — it would make the social links a LOT more effective, useful, and less frustrating!

[Alyssa]

@antonkawasaki I understand your issues now, I though the issues were unrelated when they are all about the same topic, sorry about that.

1) I am unable to replicate the issue where if one link is added they all show up. Can you verify this same activity on your online environment?

3) Understood, I’ll see if they can add in address formatting

4) Correct, I think this hasn’t been built in yet but also could be because how it is added via WordPress. I’ll ask the devs if they can add this in as well.

5) Just to clarify the links in the footer are separate from the profile SM links, the footer SM links are for the site.

[Anton]

1). Please see attached image. This is what I mean — I entered only two social media links, but the rest of them are displayed (empty). My point was…if I don’t enter URL’s for any of the other fields, shouldn’t those ones NOT be displayed with an empty field? If I only enter one URL, the whole grid still shows up. It just looks silly…

3). & 4). SWEET!!! 🙂

5). I didn’t mean the links in the footer! Sorry…this has been my most misunderstood point so far. I meant the links at the bottom of a user’s profile (the same ones shown in my attached image). In this case, I was giving my original point AFTER the suggestion to HIDE this section altogether. While I’m able to hide with CSS as a sorta-temporary fix (because I don’t like how this section is currently working/displaying at the moment), it still leaves me with the problem of those fields still appearing in the “Edit Profile” view.
Just ignore points 5 & 6 altogether! 😛

[Alyssa]

@antonkawasaki 1) CORRECT, but I am unable to replicate this activity in my dev environment online which is why I asked if you experience this in your online environment since other issues were resolved by changing environments.

5) OK 🙂

[Anton]

@tjchester 1). Yes, the previous screenshot I gave was from my ONLINE environment. You can also see just from the Boss demo that even when all social media URL’s aren’t filled in, those fields show up anyway (just empty).

[Varun Dubey]

Hello @antonkawasaki add this function in the functions.php of the child theme it will remove those social fields from the input area.

function remove_social()
{
remove_action("bp_after_profile_field_content","buddyboss_user_social_fields");
}
add_action('bp_init','remove_social');

Regards
Varun Dubey

[Anton]

Thanks for this, @vapvarun!

I do like the IDEA of the social fields — I just wish they were done a different way, and added more flexibility. If they ever get improved in an update, I’ll happily add them back in then.

[Anton]

@vapvarun @tjchester I just saw that the update makes the social links into hyperlinks, and hides the ones that aren’t filled out. Really works beautifully now. Much appreciated, guys!!!

[Varun Dubey]

Thanks @antonkawasaki

Regards
Varun Dubey