Recent Profile Visitors

When nobody knows who is looking, nobody feels seen

On a social network built with BuddyPress, people log in, browse profiles and leave without a trace. The member who put effort into completing their profile doesn't know if anyone read it, and without that signal it's harder to come back. Recent Profile Visitors records who passes through each profile and gives that information back to its owner, and also brings the most visited members of the community into the spotlight.

There is a practical truth about communities: people take part when they sense others are watching. A list of recent visits is a very cheap reason for a member to return to the site to see who took an interest in them.

Recent visitors and most visited users: what Recent Profile Visitors does

The plugin covers two different uses that are best not mixed up:

• Recent visitors of a profile: shown in the profile header, as a tab in the members directory and, if you enable it, as a dedicated profile component where the user sees who visited them in the last 7 days, 30 days or all time.
• Most popular users: a ranking of the most visited profiles over a period you choose, for example the top 10 of the last 30 days. It is displayed as a list or a slider, with or without the visit count.

Widget and shortcodes

It includes a most visited users widget and two shortcodes: one for the ranking of popular users (with options for view, maximum entries, days and whether to show the visit count) and another for the recent visitors of a specific user or of the logged-in user (with user, maximum and duration in days). That way you can place either list on pages, posts or sidebars.

What you should be clear about

It is an add-on for BuddyPress, so it makes no sense without it. It is not a general analytics tool either: it only counts visits to member profiles, not to the rest of your site. And if your theme doesn't show visitors in the profile header, you'll need to call a code function to display them, or use the shortcode.

Privacy: visits are mutual by default

This is the point that most affects your community. The default rule is reciprocal: if a user wants to see who visited their profile, they must have the recording of their own visits turned on. If they turn it off, the plugin stops saving data about them and doesn't show them their visitors either. As an administrator you can change this policy.

• You can exclude specific roles from visit recording.
• You can turn the whole feature off for certain roles, so they don't see their visitors.
• Users can set their own preference from their profile settings, if you allow it.
• There are optional notifications, local or by email, to alert about visits.

If your community includes sensitive data or minors, first think about whether you want it to be known who looks at whom, and explain it in your rules.

Frequently asked questions

Can I reserve the visitor list for paying members?

Yes, it's possible. You can turn the feature on or off by role or by subscription status with a small code snippet, relying on the subscription plugin you use. It is not a panel setting, it requires code.

Does it work with BuddyBoss?

There are specific notes for BuddyBoss: in recent versions, this plugin's notification settings are managed from BuddyBoss notifications instead of the plugin's own options.

The settings are in the panel, not in code

The main options are changed from the admin area: number of visitors shown, period, whether it appears in the header or in the directory, avatar size, notifications and recording policy. If you come from an old version with custom code, it's best to remove it and use the panel.

For developers there are functions that return unique visitors, total visits of a profile and the latest visitors of a user, useful if you want to build your own screen.

Your theme decides whether visitors appear on their own

Most BuddyPress themes show recent visitors through the profile header hook. If yours doesn't, first check that someone has actually visited that profile, because with no visits there is nothing to list. Then use the shortcode or the code function to place it where you want. Test the result with two different accounts and remember that, with the mutual policy, both must have recording turned on.