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So after much research and trial and error, I’ll put my solution here in case someone else ever needs it.

For the Members page, instead of just showing the user’s friends, I opted to just get rid of the members page altogether. I don’t really see it’s need and it didn’t fit in with my site. Here are the steps.

1. Enable root profiles. This will no longer put users into the members directory, and remove /members/ from the profile url. http://www.yoursite.com/members/user1 becomes http://www.yoursite.com/user1 which is something I’ve also been wanting. Create bp-custom.php in the plugins folder (if it doesn’t already exist). Add the following code into it:

<?php
 define ( 'BP_ENABLE_ROOT_PROFILES', true ); 
?>

2. Remove access to the members page. Use redirection in htaccess to redirect if a user ever tries to go to the members page. Add the following to your htaccess:

redirect 301 /members http://www.WhereYouWantThemDirectedTo/

I could be wrong, but I believe redirecting as a 301 prevents a negative impact to your SEO because you’re telling search engines the page exists, it just was moved to different url. I’m redirecting back to my homepage if anyone tries to go to the members page on my site. It’s not in the navigation anywhere, but if they were really curious they could go to the direct link. Not anymore at least 🙂 Also, I found if you try to hide/modify access to the members page without enabling root profiles, you won’t be able to access any profiles since it relies on the members page. Enabling root profiles gets rid of that dependency.

The activity page was a little more in depth, but I finally got that to only show activity from the users network instead of sitewide activity. I also hid the all activity tab so they can’t choose to see things from outside of their network.

@tjchester I’ve successfully moved the code to functions.php in my child theme and removed the bp-custom.php and all is working fine. Thanks for the suggestion!