What Happens When a Post Goes Live?
Understand how virtual member activities appear on your community site and what real members see.
When BuddyActivity processes a scheduled activity, it creates a real BuddyBoss activity entry — the same as if the virtual member had logged in and posted themselves. From a real member's perspective, the post is indistinguishable from any other community activity.
In the Activity Feed
Posts published by virtual members appear in the BuddyBoss activity feed:
- The post shows the virtual member's name, avatar, and timestamp.
- Real members can like, comment on, and reply to the post.
- The post appears in the group's activity stream and the site-wide activity feed.
- Real members who follow the group will see the post in their personal feeds.
Notifications
BuddyBoss notifications behave normally for virtual member activity:
- Group members may receive email or push notifications about new group activity, depending on their notification preferences.
- Real members who are mentioned in a post or comment will receive mention notifications.
- Virtual members will technically receive notifications too — but since they do not have real inboxes, these notifications are safely ignored.
Virtual Member Profile Pages
All activities published by a virtual member also appear on their BuddyBoss profile page. If a real member visits the virtual member's profile, they will see a realistic activity history — which reinforces the sense of an active, engaged community.
Timestamps
The activity timestamp in BuddyBoss reflects the time the activity was created by BuddyActivity, not necessarily the exact scheduled_at time. On auto-sync with a 15-minute interval, activities may appear up to 15 minutes after the scheduled time.
Real Member Interactions
When real members interact with virtual member posts, those interactions are fully real:
- Real likes are counted normally.
- Real comments appear in the thread alongside any scheduled virtual member comments.
- Real replies thread correctly with both real and virtual member responses.
BuddyActivity does not interfere with or modify real member activity. Scheduled virtual activities simply seed the conversation — the community takes it from there.