In reply to John Parris.

I completely forgot about Ning. It was an early BuddyPress competitor that failed in many ways. I find it surprising that the brand is still out there. In times past, there were Ning-to-BP importers so admins can migrate over. Ning is closer to BuddyPress than as it appears to Flox. While Flox uses BuddyPress, I can see that JJJ is tuning it to remove the admin concepts of it to make it more user-oriented even from the admin aspect of things.

Good point there, and it reminds me of all the hard work that JJJ, Paul Gibbs and the others have done on BP over the years. In my opinion, BP killed beat Ning long ago (this is an entirely debatable stance, however).