bbPress is currently installed on at least 5,000 sites.
Here is a breakdown of bbPress forums by total posts:
Posts Count
0 - 99 3,000+
100 - 999 640
1,000 - 4,999 180
5,000 - 9,999 52
10,000 - 49,999 44
50,000 - 99,999 12
100,000 - 499,999 7
500,000 - 999,999 2
By my calculations, a bbPress forum will break a million posts by the end of this year!
bbPress is being used in over 80 countries (or regions).
Here is a sample in order of popularity:
. 1. United States
2. Germany
3. Spain **
4. United Kingdom
5. Russian Federation
6. Italy
7. Turkey
8. France
9. Sweden
10. China
11. Denmark
12. Netherlands
13. Canada
14. Japan
15. Europe
16. Romania
17. Czech Republic
18. Brazil
19. Norway
20. Austria
21. Poland
22. Australia
23. Switzerland
24. Hungary
25. India
26. Chile
27. Belgium
28. Argentina **
29. Indonesia
30. Finland
31. Ukraine
32. Saudi Arabia
33. Greece
34. Lithuania
35. Israel
36. New Zealand
37. Slovakia
38. Latvia
39. Mexico **
40. South Africa
** This list is subject to some inaccuracies based on guesstimates of language used or target audience. For example, a page in Spanish may be intended for an audience in Mexico, Argentina, or in Spain. A page in Arabic may be intended for several countries in the middle-east, etc.
A new feature this month is an analysis of Server and PHP software popularity. What’s interesting is how Apache use is slowly being eroded by other options. Also, PHP4 is still VERY popular (1 in 3 servers use it!)
Server Popularity (alphabetical order)
Abyss/2.0.0.20-x2-win32 : 2
Apache : 800+
Apache/1.3 : 900+
Apache/2 : 40+
Apache/2.0 : 800+
Apache/2.2 : 1000+
Ideawebserver/v0.50 : 3
Lighttpd/1.4 : 15
Litespeed : 20
Microsoft-IIS/5.0 : 12
Microsoft-IIS/6.0 : 80+
Microsoft-IIS/7.0 : 2
Nginx : 19
Nginx/0.3 : 2
Nginx/0.5 : 17
Nginx/0.6 : 10
Nginx/0.7 : 2
Webserverx : 16
Zeus/4.3 : 2
(abnormalities and unknown entities have been dropped)
PHP Popularity (by version)
4.3 : 200+
4.4 : 900+
5.0 : 40~
5.1 : 200+
5.2 : 2000+
Well that’s all for now, hope you enjoyed it.
Your feedback and ideas are encouraged.
I should note that sites that seem to be spammer operated or that I detect are infected by XSS scripts have been dropped from the list. There are currently eight sites affected by XSS and I have attemped to notify the owners (apparently without success). These infections are not from a bbPress fault but rather the overall security of their server and other software running on the site (otherwise it would be rampant).
Viva Chile Mierda !!!
Great work, _ck_. Thanks.
September also features the first site to be purposely excluded from the listings. Not that I am passing judgement on it as there are other sites far more dubious that are in the list where the content is not their own.
find-answers.net
It’s impressive in that someone wrote a bbPress to Usenet gateway. But its not right to include it on the list since there will be millions of posts in no time at all and they use a fake subdomain for each group.
At least it proves bbPress can handle such a load. They are going to really want my Super Search plugin (not released yet).
I do wish they’d share the code they made to accomplish that however, especially considering they seem to be using my theme, my plugins, my favicon, etc.
(What I really want is a Mailman to bbPress gateway!)
I wonder if the find answers site is related at all to this inquiry:
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-and-newsgroups
I’ve done some research (and actually got an email from the find-answer owner out of the blue today) and I believe the site/request are unrelated.
But it does prove that it would be a wanted plugin.
Google/Yahoo might not like all the duplicate content however so “noindex” might be a good idea to prevent being search-engine banned.
Another consideration is that I believe bbPress keeps a full index on post text, so the table size for posts would become non-trivial for such a forum.
Slightly intrigued to come across this. I’m behind find-answers.net although it’s not in my profile, because (a) it’s not a personal site, and (b) it’s not officially released.
_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: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/fulltext-searching-very-slow
15. Europe
He? Europe is a continent not a country 
I did say “or regions” which should cover Europe
“Europe” is triggered by the use of the .eu domain
