I had the exact same problem, and have found a solution that worked for my case:
I have a custom theme running and the site.com/forums/ page was not listing the forums, even though I had created a couple sample forums and topics to make sure there was dummy data.
Thanks to Jared, it became quite apparent that the “the_content()” WordPress function was not properly generating the forum.
At first I tried disabling all the plugins, except bbpress, to see if perhaps a plugin was conflicting with the “the_content()” function; but no luck.
I then installed the TwentyTwelve theme, and switched to that, and voila, the forums were showing! Something was different in the TwentyTwelve theme that I didn’t have in my custom theme… and I narrowed it down:
SOLUTION: Make sure you have the “the_post()” function call BEFORE the “the_content()” function, in your page.php template file in your theme folder. Something in bbPress must be getting triggered by the “the_post()” function which ties into the “the_content()” function displaying the forums content properly. All subsequent pages also display properly.
Simply, ensure “the_post()” is called before “the_content()”. Did the trick for me! Good luck!
