What's New in 1.2.0

This is an audit-driven release. We went back through everything the last few versions introduced and, alongside a broad sweep of mobile and privacy fixes, added real owner control: members-only posts, a say in which other plugins load on your community, and a clear choice about what happens to your data if you ever uninstall.

Note: BuddyNext free and BuddyNext Pro are released together. If you run both, update them at the same time so they stay in step.

Members-only posts

A member can now address a post to logged-in members only. The post stays publicly listed, but a logged-out visitor sees a short teaser and a prompt to join instead of the whole thing, so a community can share work openly with its members without putting everything in front of the open internet.

• The Members only audience appears in the composer for site admins and space managers, alongside Public, Followers, Connections and Only me.
• You set how much of a members-only post a visitor sees before the join prompt, with the members-only teaser control (25 percent by default).
• It is an audience level, not plan-gating: it separates members from the public. Restricting a post to a paid plan is still the Pro Content Protection feature.

You decide which plugins load, and what happens on uninstall

Two settings hand the site owner control they did not have before.

• Plugin isolation lets you choose which other plugins load on BuddyNext’s own community pages, so a heavy or conflicting plugin does not have to run where it is not needed. It stays off by default - every plugin keeps running until you opt in - and it will never remove a plugin that a plugin you kept depends on.
• An uninstall data policy lets you decide whether your community data is kept or removed if BuddyNext is ever uninstalled. Data is kept by default, so an accidental deactivate-and-delete is recoverable, and financial records are always retained.

A warmer welcome for visitors

Logged-out visitors now get a clear path in rather than a series of dead ends.

• Join prompts appear on the landing and discovery pages and on an embedded space feed, and you can turn the guest call-to-action off if you would rather not show it.
• A visitor’s View profile link opens the profile directly instead of bouncing through the login page first.

Stronger moderation tools

• A community moderator can be given moderation authority across the whole site, not only inside the spaces they moderate. Editing roles and capabilities stays with admins.
• The moderation log can be filtered, exported to CSV, and have its background jobs run on demand from the admin, and the admin hub now shows background-job and data-retention status.

Built for bigger communities

Follower, following, connection and space-member lists now use cursor-based paging, so they stay fast on a large community instead of slowing down as the numbers grow. If you build against the REST API, note that these list routes moved from page to a cursor returned as next_cursor (see the developer guide).

Sharper on mobile

• The composer footer is at most two rows on a phone with no stranded icon, and comment and reply actions collapse to a compact icon bar.
• The comment box shows the commenter’s real avatar, top-aligned, and its text is the same size as the comments below it.
• A long member handle no longer forces the members directory to scroll sideways, and the space feed’s Search button no longer stretches full-width.
• The activity hub is now labelled Activity, the alerts area is Notifications, and the notifications People filter is Follows.

Analytics you can trust (Pro)

• The monthly-active figure compares the same point in each month instead of a full month against a partial one, and the analytics strip says how fresh its numbers are.
• Each tile names the window it covers, the overview CSV exports the whole dashboard, and membership analytics show a per-member view count with a write throttle so heavy traffic does not inflate the figures.

Safer money and moderation (Pro)

• A Stripe refund or dispute now revokes the member’s paid access, and refunds, chargebacks and cancellations are recorded as distinct events.
• The AI moderation sweep can be run on demand, records every automated action as the system, and fails closed when its provider is unavailable, so content is never silently passed through as approved.
• You can register your own drip auto-enrollment triggers through a filterable registry.

For developers

• A combined free and Pro OpenAPI specification is published with namespaced paths.
• New filter seams let a companion hub plugin coexist with the Spaces UI and read cross-space members and activity.
• The social-graph and space-members list routes are keyset-paginated (cursor + per_page, returning next_cursor); see the REST reference in the developer guide.