BuddyPress 2.0 is due in approximately three weeks. The release roadmap shows it as being 74% complete. In addition to big performance improvements, this release will introduce several new WordPress admin tools to speed up common maintenance tasks for community managers.
An update committed today makes it easier for administrators to mark users as ham/spam within the admin users panel. WordPress multisite administrators will already be familiar with this functionality, as it is native to network installations. BuddyPress 2.0 will make it possible for single site administrators to spam/ham users in the same way.
Having this capability in the admin is vital to keeping spammers at bay in an instance where a single site installation might have the front-end settings component turned off. Non-multisite admins would have no way to spam/unspam users, as BuddyPress developer Boone Gorges explained in the commit message. This change makes the spam/ham tools available to administrators at all times.
Spammers will always have WordPress and BuddyPress sites among their favorite targets. While these changes coming in version 2.0 don’t actually do anything to reduce the onslaught of spam, the burden of managing a surge is easier to handle with the ham/spam user capability added to the WordPress admin.