[John James Jacoby]

If I can throw out some input, having felt both sides of this debate multiple times, I think the bbPress audience is just looking for a little more information than maybe what is presented publically, and hoping that maybe it’s delivered with a little more public relations than it is firm moderation.

Lets take a moment to be honest with each other. The bbPress website, as a whole, is in bad shape. The documentation is old and outdated, transversing multiple versions and subversions of code with no WordPress style codex to whisper about. To offer a bit of perspective to everyone, bbPress is following WordPress in it’s development style, and remember that bbPress isn’t even 1.0, and WordPress is at 2.7. Where do you think bbPress will be when it is at version 2.7?

While we’re all used to how WordPress works and how convenient it is to have years of experience and knowledge to build off of, bbPress just isn’t to that level yet, and it isn’t fair to expect for it to be.

I feel that the bbPress site needs a serious update, just like the WordPressMU site does. There needs to be some uniformity and some solid public relations going on to get the message across to answer these questions before they even begin to be thoughts in a users mind, and no offense to anyone but a sticky topic isn’t enough, even though there isn’t a sticky anymore. Even if the product is free, it’s still a product, there are reputations on the line, and ultimately someone is investing in Automattic to help pay Sam’s bills, so someone needs to be nice to the customers, even if they’re not paying a dime.

Sam, if you’re listening, I’d love to help restyle bbPress.org to help it more accurately match WordPress.org/com. I would have suspected this was something done by someone specific within Automattic, but I think I remember reading that you styled it specifically yourself. If it will help take some of the burden off of you, I’d love to help out in anyway that I can.