bbPress

I just came across the original post announcing bbPress on my blog. It’s interesting to read back on that post and comments, like going back through a time warp.

Richard Boakes, one of the first users of Akismet, has a nice summary of the benefits of bbPress.

Jazzle says,  “bbPress is a fantastic example of how the web should be made.”

Since we dropped it last night, bbPress has had 289 downloads. (We’ll look at getting a counter up like we have for WP.) When you Google for bbPress there are about 340k hits.

Many of you will remember the dark days of the bbPress Trac. For several months it was getting hit by spammers multiple times a day.

Matt put a stop to new spam a couple of months ago, but there was still a huge amount of garbage blocking up our ticketing system. All of that is now gone. Well, I’m sure I missed some here and there.

This daunting task would have been completely impossible were it not for the following three things.

1. The Ticket Delete Plugin for trac by Noah Kantrowitz. The interface is clunky (limitations in the Trac plugin API?), but it gets the job done. Kills spam dead.
2. Jesse Ruderman‘s Check Range Greasemonkey script. This thing is awesome. Move over, sliced bread.
3. Tom Preuss. Many people helped reduce spammer damage by closing tickets and so forth, but Tom gets the gold star. His faithful invalidating of spam tickets through the darkest of bbPress’ days made searching for and eliminating trash a piece of cake. Many thanks to Tom and the others who stepped in.

Thanks in part to the hard work of Juan Correa (PotterSys) and Ryan Boren, bbPress is now almost completely "gettexted" which means that all of the strings in the software can be translated and replaced on the fly. Some other code improvements have also come along the way.

All SVN changes are now being mailed to our mailing list and I've also fixed up the nightly builds so they're generating correctly now. 

Neil Patel has written some more detailed installation instructions for those of you having trouble getting started. It’s a little bit of a pain now, but hey, it’s alpha. We haven’t even gotten to the perpetual beta stage yet. I happy to say that with a little more coding this can be taken down to two or three steps, like the WordPress installation.