The BuddyPress Friendship Restrictions plugin by BuddyDev is a premium administrative tool designed to give site owners granular control over the social connection features within a BuddyPress or BuddyBoss community.
This is EXACTLY the same product as distributed by the developer. Sales Page
The plugin operates on two levels: Global Settings and Advanced (Role/Member Type) Overrides.
Sender Restrictions: Define which WordPress User Roles or BuddyPress Member Types are allowed to initiate friendship requests.
Recipient Restrictions: Define which roles/types can be added as friends.
Relationship Mapping: Create specific “Who can friend whom” rules (e.g., Subscribers can only friend Moderators, or Students cannot friend other Students).
Unfriend Control: Option to disable the “Unfriend” feature, preventing users from severing established connections.
Request Rate Limiting: Set a maximum number of friendship requests a user can send within a specific timeframe (Throttling) to prevent spam.
Friendship Caps: Set a hard limit on the total number of friends a user can have (Maximum Friend Count).
Per-Role Customization: If enabled, you can bypass global rules for specific roles (e.g., “VIP” members get unlimited friends while “Basic” members are restricted).
Permissive Logic: If a user has multiple roles, the plugin defaults to the most permissive setting available to that user.
Extensibility: Includes various WordPress hooks and filters, allowing developers to add custom restriction logic (e.g., restricting based on a custom xProfile field).
Admin Overrides: Site administrators typically bypass all restrictions by default.
Localization: Translation-ready for multilingual communities.
