Jimi,
Nice to have you aboard, and I hope that you’ll help in improving bbpress. More UX help is welcome.
I think bbpress users split into two groups.
1. The users that just want a simple forum as part of their web.
Those that visit the support forum usually only need a couple of changes. this is the vast majority of bbPress users
Biggest issues for these are
getting it working with their theme – usually because the theme has a highly complex page.php, and these users are not code savvy, and many don’t know FTP
registration and logging on – really a wordpress issue, but it’s the first time they come across needing to do this, as before they were the only user
Adding simple features – since each one varies these can only ever be bespoke, and again since these people are not code savvy you need to show them child themes and functions files first
2. Users who typically want bbpress to look like someone else’s feature rich forum
They want all the features, look and functionality of another bb, but on wordpress. Some then complain on the forum that they don’t like the software, and why doesn’t it look exactly like xx, which is much better, much easier and has better documentation. Which kinda grates, and surely it would be better to complain to xx’s forum as to why they don’t make a version of their fantastic software to work on wordpress, rather than complain that bbpress’s software doesn’t look like theirs. This to me is a bit like complaining to Ford that their cars don’t look like Nissan.
The issue here is that bbpress is just a plugin, written by some guys to do forumy stuff. Like all software it could be better, the docs can always be better, but the philosophy of the somewhere is to keep it light.
So I s’pose the challenge is to help improve it so that it can work for both camps. So I really do hope you stay and add expertise, maybe go into the codex and improve the documentation – anyone can, but most don’t !
