Re: No plugins are showing in my list
That’s the wrong location for the files. They should not be in the WordPress plugins folder. I imagine if you don’t try and activate it as a WordPress plugin from there, the worst that happens is you have to access your forum at
http://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins/bbpress/
which just looks silly. I think it would work though.
I would just make sure that bbpress folder and my-plugins folder inside that have 755 permissions.
What plugins did you install that you cannot see?
And why did you have to create the my-plugins directory? Wasn’t it there when you installed bbPress?