BuddyPress Friendship Restrictions

BuddyPress Friendship Restrictions is a premium WordPress plugin developed by BuddyDev that gives site administrators absolute control over the BuddyPress friendship system. Designed for social communities that need to manage how and between whom friendship connections are established, this plugin solves one of the biggest challenges of BuddyPress-based social networks: granular control over friend requests.

With this plugin, administrators can restrict who can send friend requests and who can be added as a friend, all based on user roles or member types. Additionally, it includes a throttling system that allows controlling how many requests a member can send in a given period, preventing spam and abuse of the friendship system. It is also possible to set a maximum friend limit per user, a feature especially useful for communities that want to maintain a more intimate and controlled environment.

One of the most notable features is the ability to completely disable the option to remove friendships, which can be relevant for communities where connections must be permanent. The plugin offers global settings that apply to the entire site, as well as advanced settings per role or member type that allow overriding global rules individually. This means you can, for example, allow administrators to have a higher friend limit than regular users, or restrict certain roles from sending requests to other specific roles.

The plugin is fully extensible through filters, allowing developers to further customize its behavior. It is compatible with BuddyPress and also integrates with BuddyBoss Platform, extending its utility to a broader audience of social communities on WordPress. If you manage a BuddyPress community and need to control connections between members, this plugin provides you with all the necessary tools to do so efficiently and flexibly.