[@_ck_ Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Unless performance is crippling slow, those users’ arguments are very valid.

bbPress’s ability to be customized and slipped into foreign environments is extremely attractive. It’s incredibly easy to customize without breaking the core like most other forums.

But look at WordPress – it’s popularity defies ALL logic. Without heavy duty caching it would collapse most large sites. Apachebench would DESTROY it without page caching (using 17 categories with 7500 users and 10k posts with 10k comments). Of course it’s the sheer number of available customizations that override the care about lack of performance.