Hidden Activities

Hiding an activity type removes it from the community in three ways: it is dropped from the filter dropdown, and, where the plugin can intercept creation, new activities of that type are prevented from being saved. The selected types are stored in the bp_activity_filter_hidden option.

What “hidden” covers

For a hidden activity type, the plugin:

1. Removes it from the filter dropdown. The dropdown options are filtered (bp_get_activity_show_filters) for both the Nouveau theme (array format) and legacy theme (HTML string format).
2. Blocks the activity at save time. On bp_activity_before_save, an activity whose type is hidden has its type and component cleared so BuddyPress does not persist it.
3. Unhooks known creators. On bp_init, the plugin removes the BuddyPress callbacks that generate a set of known activity types when the type is hidden, so the activity is never queued in the first place.

The activity types with a dedicated unhook mapping are:

• friendship_created (new friendships)
• friendship_accepted
• new_member
• updated_profile

Other hidden types are handled by the dropdown removal and the save-time block.

Core activities are protected

Two activity types can never be hidden, because they are essential to basic BuddyPress use:

• activity_update (status updates)
• activity_comment (replies to status updates)

The Hidden Activities tab shows these in a separate, read-only “Core Activities” group. Even if a hidden value for one of them is submitted, the plugin strips it out on save and again when reading the hidden list.

Available activity types

The list of hideable types is built from BuddyPress’s registered activity actions. Two registration artifacts are filtered out so they do not appear as choices:

• friendship_accepted is skipped, because BuddyPress records the friendship_created type rather than a separate accepted type.
• friends_register_activity_action is skipped, because it is a registration helper, not a real activity type.

The friendship_created label is presented as “New friendships” for clarity.

Effect on existing activities

Hiding a type stops it appearing in the dropdown and stops new ones being created. It does not delete activities of that type that already exist in the database.