make sure you’re putting it in the index.php in the total theme folder in wp-content/themes
For anyone interested this is the fix
This is actually a bbPress issue with the singular.php template which was introduced in WordPress 4.3 but bbPress doesn’t support it yet. It looks like it has been fixed in core already – https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/5950 – but the update hasn’t been released yet.
If you add the following code to the top of your index.php for your theme it will provide a temp fix:
// bbPress fix while they update things…
if ( function_exists( ‘is_bbpress’ ) && is_bbpress() ) {
get_template_part( ‘singular’ );
return;
}