Steve

bbPress Version Popularity

1.1 : 1%
1.0 : 48%
0.9 : 36%
0.8 : 15%   (includes sites below 1.x that hide their version
as 0.8 has no consistent way to be detected)

PHP Popularity

5.3 : 4%
5.2 : 70%
5.1 : 4%
5.0 : 1%
4.4 : 6%
4.3 : 1%
?? : 15% (unknown)

So PHP version 5 adoption has finally taken off in late 2010.

Server Popularity

Apache 	 	: 40%  	  (specific version unknown)
Apache/2.2 	: 35%
Apache/2 	: 10%	  (sub-version unknown)
Apache/1.3 	: 5%
Nginx 		: 5%
Microsoft-IIS	: 3%
Litespeed 	: 2%

(and quite a few others/variations but below a single percent each)

Downloads via bbPress.org as of October 2010

bbPress 0.9 : 150,000+
bbPress 1.0 : 129,000+
_ck_ plugins: 102,000+ (total, all included)

United States
Russia
Germany
United Kingdom
Spain
France
Italy
Turkey
Poland
Brazil
Canada
China
Netherlands
Sweden
Japan
Australia
Denmark
Romania
Ukraine
Switzerland
Czech Republic
Finland
Norway
Argentina
Thailand
Bulgaria
South Africa
Iran
Hungary
Austria
Latvia
Lithuania
Belgium
New Zealand
Israel
Indonesia
Slovakia
Portugal
Tokelau
Ireland
Chile
Mexico
South Korea
Serbia
Taiwan
Saudi Arabia
Greece
Malaysia
Estonia
Philippines

Note that the targeted audience as indicated by the flags on the right of the list is more of an art than a science, so please do not be insulted if my algorithm got it wrong. It's a combination of looking at the TLD and the declared language type being used on the page.

For example a site may have a flag for Spain if Spanish is used but no other specific variation or TLD is used, etc.

The most popular TLDs for bbPress forums are:

.com (by 50% !)
.org
.net
.ru
.uk
.de
.it
.info
.ca   (honourable mention as .ca has 50% less than .info
however pl, fr, nl, se and au all have over 100 sites)

We have a new leader Singletrack Mountain Bike Magazine
beating out the old champion Simon & Schuster (international book publisher).
with nearly 1.8 MILLION posts. Absolutely incredible growth!

There are five bbPress powered forums with over a million posts now!

singletrackworld.com  http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/
simonandschuster.com  http://forums.simonandschuster.com/
wordpress.org         http://wordpress.org/support/
greedyorneedy.com     http://www.greedyorneedy.com/forum/
weddingbee.com        http://boards.weddingbee.com/

Nearly 300 more have over ten thousand posts,
and nearly 1,000 have over one thousand posts.

Over four dozen new bbPress powered forums are put online every week on average!

This will be the last look* at the incredible growth and diversity of
bbPress adoption around the world over the past several years.
You can see the previous summaries here via the Top100 tag.

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top100

The list is based on post count which implies highest activity.
Sites that appear to fake the numbers or have dubious content
have been moved to the bottom of the Top 10,000

To see the complete Top 10,000 requires free registration/login:
http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top10000

Logged in users can also search the list and view the experimental
Tag Cloud http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top10000?cloud
and vote on sites that may have superior design even if they didn't
make the Top 100 regardless of their volume of activity.

This list does not include most of the 1000+ or so BuddyPress installations
that use bbPress to power sub-forums for their groups. This is for technical
reasons, not political - it's virtually impossible to analyze bbPress under
BuddyPress because of how it's filtered and blocked. If you have a large
bbPress installation under BuddyPress and you are not in the current list,
contact me for a way to be included if your site would fall in the top 1,000.

*The upcoming rewrite of bbPress will make this kind of third-party analysis
extremely difficult but also unneccesary since it will start to "phone home"
as part of WordPress to Automattic on a daily basis from your server
with all your details, configuration and install information anyway.

So on that note, let's take a look at the results from the final list!

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbshowcase-shut-down

The removal of Sam Bauers and the halting of bbpress.org 2.0
was a clear and final sign that there is no interest in allowing
bbPress to become a mature, robust program and community.

By now bbPress 1.5 could have been in alpha but instead
bbPress development has been deliberately stagnated,
which should be a very alarming warning to everyone.

In addition, bbShowcase had only six donations in 2009,
which indicated to me there was no interest in my work.

My code will remain on bbpress.org as open source GPL
for those that wish to use it, however I caution you to
consider bbPress's lack of leadership before continuing to use it."

What gives?

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top100?add

It's getting harder and harder to find them all as there are so many themes and customizations being created, so feel free to submit any forum you know is powered by bbPress to help me.

I like how you replaced "sticky" with a nifty little icon.

Thanks! That was my first 'hack' for bbPress and I slapped this in my functions.php

// This sets sticky label as an image
remove_filter('bb_topic_labels', 'bb_sticky_label', 20);
function my_sticky_label( $label ) {
        global $topic;
        if (is_front()) {
                if ( '2' === $topic->topic_sticky ) {
                        return sprintf(__('<img src="/images/sticky.png" alt="[sticky]" /> %s'), $label);
                }
        } else {
                if ( '1' === $topic->topic_sticky || '2' === $topic->topic_sticky ) {
                        return sprintf(__('<img src="/images/sticky.png" alt="[sticky]" /> %s'), $label);
                }
        }
        return $label;
}
add_filter('bb_topic_labels', 'my_sticky_label', 20);

Let's just say I have a new found respect for Google - I think they must look at whois info for the domain owner registration. I don't quite have the resources to mimic that yet.

906 isn't too shabby considering how many sites there are now.
I like how you replaced "sticky" with a nifty little icon.

* PHP Popularity
5.2.x : 62%
5.1.x : 5%
4.4.x : 15%
4.3.x : 2%

* Server Popularity
Apache/2.x : 56%
Apache : 24% (unknown version)
Apache/1.3 : 11%
Microsoft-IIs : 3%
Litespeed : 1%
Lighttpd : 0.5%
Nginx : 0.5%

* bbPress Popularity
1.0a6 : 5%
1.0 ? : 5% (1.0 using pre-a6)
0.9.x : 52%
0.8.x : 35% (this is likely wrong, it includes 0.8 installs that upgraded to 0.9)

Here are some other ranges by number of posts:

1,000,000 + 	 	3
100,000 - 499,999	 11
50,000 - 99,999	 	 22
10,000 - 49,999	 	70+
5,000 - 9,999	 	70+
1,000 - 4,999		 300+
100 - 999		1000+

bbPress is being used in nearly 90 countries/regions.
Here are the top 50 in order of highest use.
(note that as we get lower in the list, the higher the chance of inaccuracy,
some countries/languages are hard to detect)

1. United States
2. Germany
3. Russian Federation
4. Spain
5. United Kingdom
6. Italy
7. France
8. Turkey
9. Canada
10. Netherlands
11. Sweden
12. Denmark
13. China
14. Japan
15. Brazil
16. Europe
17. Romania
18. Poland
19. Australia
20. Norway
21. India
22. Argentina
23. Ukraine
24. Czech Republic
25. Belgium
26. Switzerland
27. Finland
28. Austria
29. Indonesia
30. Hungary
31. Bulgaria
32. Montenegro
33. Iran
34. Saudi Arabia
35. Ireland
36. Chile
37. Latvia
38. Niue
39. Portugal
40. South Africa
41. Israel
42. New Zealand
43. Greece
44. Malaysia
45. Slovakia
46. Lithuania
47. Mexico
48. Thailand
49. Serbia
50. Singapore

Top 1000 requires free registration/login:
http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top1000

New this year is the ability to vote on sites, based on quality/content, so even if a site is not in the regular Top 100 list, be sure to "vote it up" and I will post another list soon with the highest votes. There are some really nice looking forums running bbPress out there that deserve some votes. You must be a member to vote but registration is free of course. The Top 1000 list can also be searched when you are logged in, as well as an experimental Tag Cloud

When we last left the list, it had just topped over 4000 websites.
In the newest list, despite roughly 1000 sites disappearing (small test installs, etc.) the list is now over 6000 strong! This means an average of 15 sites per day are installing and sticking with bbPress. About 10% of these forums are running the new 1.0 alpha (and half of those have not upgraded to the newest 1.0a6, so they need to keep up with the releases).

At this rate, next time I am going to have to make it the Top 10,000 list.

However I am sad to report a dark side has emerged in bbPress's growth. Because of how much easier bbPress is to control and manipulate with just a basic knowledge of PHP/MySQL compared to other forum software, some "black hats" have latched onto bbPress in order to create a big content spamming network, nearly 200 sites strong. They aim these sites at search engines with topics such as gambling, lottery and foreign currency exchanges. You can see them at the very end of the Top 1000 list, where they sit demoted. This really doesn't affect the average forum operator in any way, it's just unfortunate to see. WordPress went through this kind of event too, I just hate to see it happen.

ps. This list also marks the first inclusion of a TalkPress powered site and while it only has a couple dozen posts because it's brand new, it has the easy access of 7.5million WordPress.com members so it's bound to grow quickly!

Thanks for all the plugins as well =)

http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top1000?cloud
(requires free registration to use)

I'm still tweaking some of it's visual layout and abilities but it's fun to play with.

Your Post is in good time, it's the birth of the Set Forever forum powered by bbpress 1.0 alpha 2 (as it's called currently).

So bbPress installations are surging to nearly 5001 forums and todays bbPress installations may have just been 11 with the one on Set Forever.

Please take a look and be gentle as it's my first work with bbPress.

http://www.setforever.org/forums/

It's been a big year with new features being added at a rapid pace thanks to hard work by Sam and Mike. It's an easy guess that we should see a stable 1.0 beta by the end of 2008.

But don't let the modest sounding "1.0" fool you, it's practically a "2.0" inside with all the changes since 0.9 including BackPress integration (merges core functions from WordPress) and an XML-RPC api like WordPress as well.

While Matt Mullenweg (Automattic/WordPress founder) created bbPress during Christmas 2004 to power WordPress.org, version 0.7.2 (nicknamed “bix”) was only officially released for public consumption on Saturday October 14th 2006 making it two years old today.

Regardless of being summarily deleted from Wikipedia this year, bbPress has never been more popular. I've been tracking bbPress growth via the Top 100 and Top 1000 lists for over a year now and this month shows the list surging to nearly 5000 forums, with bbPress being used in over 80 countries and in dozens of languages.

Roughly 10 sites a day have installed bbPress over the past two years and over 70% them continue to use it. The largest bbPress forum is about to break a million posts by the end of the year and just to be on the Top 100, a forum now needs at least 7000 posts.

bbPress hosted forums via TalkPress (ala WordPress.com) are on the horizon, and with new forum conversion software being developed and more plugins and themes available than ever before, bbPress will definitely make it's mark in 2009 and should have a very exciting third year!

He? Europe is a continent not a country ;-)

_ck_ How did you find it? I've not linked to it nor told anyone about it! Check the administrator profile, you'll find the site has only been up four days! (So it wasn't even live when the September top 100 was put up.) That is one reason I'm not yet sharing the code. Quite simply, it doesn't work properly yet.

The other reason I'm not yet able to share the code is that I need to make sure the licence I want to use is compatible with the licences of the borrowed nntp libraries.

If it's any interest, one of the forums currently has around 475,000 posts. That equates to 411Mb of MySQL data in all the bbpress tables (including indices). The posts table has 208Mb of data and a 162Mb index.

_ck_ They're not fake sub-domains. I've simply grouped forums into helpful 'clusters' and added a subdomain (actually a separate bbpress installation) for each cluster (why buy a new domain for each site?). They look fake because find-answers.net just contains a tiny bit of php code which scans my database tables for the separate installations and presents it in a forum like view. But each site is a separate installation.

Finally, the main purpose of this was to present data from non-propagating newsgroups which most people can't access. It was largely curiosity that led to me create subdomains for publicly accessible newsgroups. I've no idea whether Google will like it or not. There's certainly other NNTP mirrors out there that do get indexed.

And you're quite right about me needing the SuperSearch plugin! It is me that you're talking to here: http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/fulltext-searching-very-slow