On a recent development job we encountered a real stumper — our buddypress activity streams weren’t showing any blog posts. We searched high and low, all over the deep internets…til we realized the very simple yet grossly un-publicized problem:

If you are using buddypress and you have your privacy settings set to block search engines, blog posts will not show up as part of the activity stream.

Go to Settings > Privacy to enable search engine access. If you are worried about access, you might consider some serious manual .htaccess mods and a robust robots.txt (for those search engines that play nice).

Hope this little bit of advice will save someone a few hours of sweat pouring, banging-head-against-wall agony.

Here’s a summary of the symptoms and error messages:
Your buddy press activity stream will not pick up Posts made by your users, and you get the following message:
Sorry, there was no activity found. Please try a different filter.

[This problem was encountered using WordPress 3.0 (wp3, wp3.0) with a multisite setup, but we don’t think it’s exclusive to that environment.)

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