Hello BuddyDev Support,

we are experiencing an intermittent issue with the BuddyPress Profile Visibility Manager plugin in a BuddyBoss environment, which may indicate an unintended interaction between the plugin and BuddyBoss’ follow/friendship features.

Summary of the problem

Some users are unexpectedly having their profile visibility reset to “Hidden” without taking any action in the Profile Privacy settings themselves.

When this happens, the following user meta values are all set exactly as if the user had manually set their profile to maximum privacy:

ini
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bp_profile_visibility = ‘self’
bp_exclude_in_dir = ‘yes’
bp_exclude_in_search = ‘yes’
bp_hide_last_active = ‘yes’
bp_allow_friendship_request = ‘no’
bp_friends_list_visibility = ‘self’
bp_profile_group_tab_visibility = ‘self’
The reset does not seem to be triggered by our own custom code (we have logging on all our related hooks), but matches exactly what would happen if the plugin’s own save handler had run.

Observed trigger pattern

In several cases, this happens immediately after a user either follows another user or accepts/sends a friendship request.

It appears to only affect the initiator of the follow/friend action, not the recipient.

Once we manually restore visibility to “Public” in the Profile Privacy tab, we are not able to reproduce the problem for the same user pair by simply unfollowing/refollowing.

Reproduction difficulty

The bug is intermittent. It does not always occur, and it does not affect every user.

We have observed it with the BuddyBoss Follow feature and possibly also in the Friendship workflow (on request acceptance).

Environment

BuddyBoss Platform (latest version)

BuddyPress Profile Visibility Manager (latest version)

BuddyBoss Follow and Friendship features enabled

We use both the frontend Profile Privacy UI and programmatic meta updates for some custom flows (with proper function calls).

Our own code does not write to these meta keys outside of these controlled contexts.

Questions / request for clarification

Does the plugin listen to or hook into BuddyBoss follow/friendship actions (friends_friendship_accepted, bp_follow_start_following, etc.) in a way that might reapply default privacy settings?

Could there be a safeguard/reset routine that runs in certain user actions and unintentionally applies the “Only Me” preset?

Is there any known issue of the plugin triggering a full privacy reset from a different part of BuddyBoss (e.g., when a new relationship is formed)?

We can provide additional debug logs and call stacks from a monitoring tool we implemented to trace exactly where the meta updates originate. If helpful, we can also set up a staging environment for reproduction testing.

Thank you for looking into this — it’s a subtle but disruptive problem for our members, and pinpointing whether it originates from the plugin would help us a lot.

Best regards,