2015 Survey Results

We need more bee puns on the codex main page.

Keep up the great work!

bbPress is awesome. I would like to see some improvement on the default stylings. Creating custom templates and styles always seems like I have to take a lot away and start breaking it down before I can start adding my own, unique styles to blend it in with a theme.
I a bbPress-oriented child theme for Stargazer called Stargazer Colloquium (it's int the repo) and in the process of it, I was reminded of how "built up" the styles are with all the borders and lines. It almost feels as if bbPress is trying to cling to the old-fashioned look-and-feel of legacy forums. A modernized, but simple and light-weight stylesheet would go a long way toward making it more developer friendly while giving a fresh-modernized look out of the box. At the same time, if done well, it could continue to establish bbPress as a leading forum software.

Make it more like a proper forum. Include latest unread posts in all forums on front page.

We love bbPress here at SignalHound.com... sure, it may have an issue here and there, but the value it brings in by letting us interact directly with our customers is priceless... oh yeah, and its FREE! Great for SEO, easily styled and configurable on the front end, adaptable to any theme... it really is great. Looking forward to future enhancements!

It's cool.

Thanks for all you're doing! I love bbPress :D

bbPress needs better integration with WP user roles to allow basic granular permissions (per role and per forum+children) built in and easy to access and config without unreliable 3rd party plugins, this was actually easier to accomplish before bbPress changed to dynamic roles...

Needs better support.

I use bbPress because it works with my WordPress customer base, but it needs to be more user friendly and provide more features more conventional forum softwares provide, these which ppl are used to.

I love it (bbPress) and am super excited to see how it develops.
It's sometimes sad to see that bbPress doesn't seem (to my perhaps ignorant eye!) to get the attention it could from the dev team (not blaming, it's just the way it is) and if it's at all possible I think development should be sped up.
Also, the web has changed and we all see that forums are not at all as popular as they once were. It would be great if bbPress could get ahead of the game and implement more modern features (more ajax immediate responses etc) and change what our idea of a forum is, before other software (Discourse for example) becomes the 'go to' for more modern developers and becomes the standard for the new generation of forums.
Lastly, THANK YOU and keep up the good work!

Release 2.6

When I first start using bbPress (2012) I had a lot of problems with the conversion from Invision Forums. I still have big performance and other smaller issues (400.000 replies, 60.000 topics, 18.000 users)
We (bbPress fans) are waiting for 2.6 version.
I believe on all of you contributing bbPress... keep going!

I've been satisfied with bbPress. Thanks for the work that goes into it!

Great work, keep it up and stable! :)

So far I am really impressed with this plugin. I wanted to add some simple forums to my wordpress website without going down the whole dedicated forum route as well as replace WordPress comments with forum based comments. This seems to fit the bill quite nicely. I do wish there were a few more classic forum specific features, but I can easily work with what is currently there.

I like bbpress and it's good that you do these surveys.

I need more customiseble widgets for my landing page. Way to display what's going on in the forums.
A widget I dream about: Last replys in forums with except and avatar. That can be ajusted to a specific number of replays.
Thanks for all your hard word!

I am very happy with the constant development of bbPress and hope to eventually be able to become a core developer.

bbPress is an excellent plugin, imho it only lacks some light and activity around it. Bravo to the bbPress core team for the great work so far :)

I love bbPress, but some aspects of it are really behind the times. I really could use a full fledged shortcodes system. I know it supports a few now, but there are very few, if any, options we can add to them, which are really important for a lot of people. There is so much data that bbPress has that people want to use on their sites which we need shortcodes for.
The only other thing I'd like to add is that bbPress should make styling a lot easier. Add a custom CSS section in the settings. Make it more responsive. Really, design is so important! The average user isn't able to work with bbPress or BuddyPress at all in this aspect.

just a good simple efficient product, but no enough time to go deeper in his dev... Michel as author of xili-language trilogy based on taxonomy and so compatible with bbPress. Cheers.

Keep developing/evolving.

I would like to see bbPress simplified and polished. It's almost as big as WordPress now.

bbPress is good stuff. Could have better end user docs, maybe a simple video or flowchart. It's easy for me but clients get confused sometimes or don't know what things are (ex super sticky posts). Theme compatibility could be improved for the forum root archive (site.com/forums)...many theme's content.php (or similar) show the excerpt on archives.

Mobile experience is essential.

Bottom line!..Awesome!!! :o)

bbpress needs to be a complete solution for forum including social and search engine optimization. At this time I find issues with making forum SEO friendly.

Congrats on the work so far! =)

First of all, I'm very thankful for your time you invest into the development and maintenance of bbPress, without getting paid for it. But. I've just tried to complete this short quick survey on my iPhone 5. It took me about 40 (!!!!!!!) minutes, lot of swearing and patience. This isn't right. It's impossible to use it on mobile devices without a lot of modifications. Mobile first is an imperative in 2015 and without it all the other efforts are worthless. Please consider creating a Premium/Commercial version, which people can pay for and use for their commercial projects. Thank you. Greetings from Vienna. Kind Regards, Martin

bbPress isn't responsive by default. This really needs to be a mobile-first plugin to ride the wave of the future sites powered by WordPress.

Great when it works. Just wish the extra plug-ins were up to date and didn't break my site when they aren't.

I have searched and searched for a plugin that would allow a membership site's users the option of bulk emailing one another (with all but the sender's email address invisible to other recipients) similar to the way Yahoo Groups email works. If that could work as an add-on to bbPress...awesome!

Nice. For first time I'm noticed for this survey. Keep up the hard work guys.

Please increase the overall font size. That is the number one complaint I see from people. Yes, I can change it, but there is no global way to do it - I have to copy and paste a ton of CSS. No one can read teeny 10px font, so I'm not sure why it doesn't inherit from the theme's body font size.

I have only installed bbPress ona couple of sites but so far have had no issues or complaints from clients. As a developer with experience coding in YABB PHPBB and a few others, I find bbPress very easy to customize.

Good job in conducting this survey and letting people voice their opinion. We all really appreciate your relentless work in bbPress over the years.
In my opinion, the real power of BBPress is when combined as a unified solution along with Wordpress and/or Buddypress. That's what's the central difference from all other forum software.
Therefore, I would really appreciate any future bbPress directions towards
1. Complete unification with WP and BP, especially with respect to (optionally) unifying comments with topic replies.
2. Speed and ease of navigation (ajaxification of things - we do live in a an era where speed and as less user qffort as possible prevail, don't we)
3. A better look-and-feel in order to attract forum owners who use other forum software, but feel like their users will have to learn again how to navigate/post/use the "new" forum. For this, conversion scripts from other forums should be also optimized.
Help us create! :)

Was much harder to set up than I thought it would be- had trouble customizing.

I love bbPress and WordPress because both are free. If someday bbPress grows like vBulletin or xenForo, I think everybody will choose bbPress as the default source for create forum.

We need more features on this great plugin!

I love bbPress, but if creating a forum plugin wasn't such a big job, I'd probably try to make my own, with an emphasis on being lightweight and simple.
I understand and appreciate that you have to keep it working AND looking good on thousands of installs, which I'm sure is no easy task.

I like using bbPress, it works well. My concern is slow development cycle for fixes and new features. I currently use other plugins and some hacks to get much needed functionality.

Looking forward to more flexibility to the look/feel of the forums as well as more UI elements rather than text representations of everything.

Slow iteration of releases compared to eg WordPress and BuddyPress. But overall a great plugin and I hope its development goes from strength to strength. The easy integration with WordPress and ease of maintenance makes site management much easier compared with a WordPress + eg vBulletin install (which I have used previously).

Thanks for the survey and continued bbPress development.

Thank you for all the hard work! I really want to see bbPress do well.

In the past I've used most other open source forums and have built multiple sites using phpBB and a variety of forum extensions for Joomla. They were all pretty bad and very difficult to maintain over time. I also used bbPress early in its history and really did not like it, mainly for usability reasons. I've never found anything remotely decent as an alternative other than Discourse, which has other drawbacks. I realize bbPress has improved a lot. I've demoed it a few times in the past 1-2 years, and I would like to use it, but performance issues and future development are unclear.

Nice job but you guys should really improve bbPress's accessibility.

Hierarchical Forum and Category Layout theme - #1958 - PLEASE solve it ASAP :) Thanks for all the work ;) https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/1958

The survey is good. I may use it for my own plugins too. I like the questions. I find bbPress confusing to setup & also lacking more documentation on how to setup.

bbPress isn't bad in general, I still believe it's the best way to start when you already own a WordPress webiste.
bbPress is still lean, mean and simple - it should stay that way.
I feel like we could better wrap the current milestone up and release it already. I don't mind slower development. We don't need every month an update ( security updates aside ) but BuddyPress gets way more love and deserves to be online and active. bbPress is in the middle line. It's should be online because the idea and code is pretty - it just doesn't get any love anymore. Releasing two solid updates a year and closing around 100 tickets on each of those updates should be doable.
That's my opinion.

Great idea :-)

Thanks for your great forum plugin and putting this survey. One think I would like to see improved is to be more able to customize forums and topics, the way they are displayed.

bbPress miss a lot of Features, that i know from other forum software. It need to be more a real forum, not only a simple message board like actually is.

I love WordPress and don't know how much I like bbPress. I need that image functionality so much. I probably could add it with a plugin, but I've lost my mind. Need help with it.

I love bbPress, but I've been hesitant to use it fully until it supports the ability to replace comments with topic threads. I don't want to use an additional plugin for this. I prefer that this be built into bbPress as an option.

I've haven't really utilized bbPress yet but do have plans to implement in the future. I mostly have been exploring BuddyPress with sometimes adding forums via local dev site activating bbPress. What I have noticed on both Plugin Support Forums: Users Post Support Topics on BuddyPress/ vice verse....to only be directed to bbPress Support Forum and/or documentation. I see most wanting utilize both so I think it will be natural to merge the projects in terms of: Community Volunteers, Community Support & Community Documentions instead Spreading The Project(s) ManPower so thin.

It's a great tool but needs improvement and most of the plugins available seems to be discontinued.
Needs more documentation too.
Thanks anyway. I will keep it for my community, took me weeks to setup and fix all styles and minor issues, but now is fine.

I think bbpress is great and I use it more than BuddyPress but like BuddyPress i think the lack of attachments/wp media integration is a big issue as well as basic forum features like most the ones in the question 24! as a sidenote and a extension of this issue the problem with the long term use of bbPress plugins... since a lot die off or are not popular but provide those features that bbPress lack, so i keep having issue with plugins breaking >_> thanks again!

bbPress needs some of the features of other professional forum software. Else it's just a workaround for buying a real forum software.

Survey was clean and simple, bbpress need to improve a lot, it need to be more like a real forum (mybb) its lacking a lot of visuals and feature of a forum.