You won’t get much advice about other forum software in these forums, as these forums are for bbPress (not against it.)
The support in these forums is all volunteer based. No one gets paid to be around to help. Everyone is passionate, but no one is obligated. We have great moderators that keep things clean, but your experience is not uncommon – it helps to be your own site admin.
I see you’ve created 6 topics here, 1 of them was asking for some code help, and 2 of them (including this one) are general gripes with (not) getting things working how you’d like them to without anything really to say back?
bbPress is intentionally simple forum software. It’s opinionated but flexible, so you get a pretty basic experience out of the box, but it requires a bit of determination to customize it to do exactly what you want it to.
You’re right that most hosting providers are generally disinterested in helping with websites themselves; they’re in the business of making sure websites work, so they’re not spending much time deep into how plugins and themes look or feel or work with one another. They’ll probably redirect you back here for most bbPress questions.
If you’re the only person running your community, and you’re unable to keep things working on your own, I can understand why you feel the way you do. I can tell you that bbPress.org runs an unmodified version of bbPress that has required very little ongoing maintenance. All we’ve done here is create a WordPress theme to make things feel a little bit more like a forum than a blog. Together with WordPress.org we do have 11 million user accounts and a high volume of concurrent users across multiple different forums.
It sounds like your forums might be more active than ours here, but it’s hard to know exactly what glitches and problems you’re having, and most things aren’t as easy as coding a snippet for you and having you drop it in someplace.
I’m sorry that your experience with bbPress hasn’t been pleasant. I’m not sure what more to say, other than if you keep with it and keep learning, it is a very capable and fun piece of software that helps hundreds of thousands of communities run really smoothly. Hopefully that continues to include yours!
