[_ck_]

I guess part of my concern is how casually it’s either told or assumed that BB integrates with WP, and that BB is ready for primetime. There’s good reason why it’s set at a pre-1.0 version number.

Many people here are integrating micro-forums with a handful of members, never more than a few people on at the same time. If there’s a problem, it can wait as it’s not an active website.

But my experience with BB was that tried integrating BB with several hundred members on a WP site. I eventually had to take it offline a week later. Here’s why:

First it took a day or two to find the plugin to fix spaces with usernames. Eventually I found out spaces were not the only problem, dots were not covered so I had to patch that.

Then I found out that many people had their cookies set to “remember me” which means even when you fix the cookie path so it off the root, it’s useless because the old cookie will never delete. Had to deal with dozens of emails and complaints and give them all individual instructions. Then there’s the problem of hundreds of people making hundreds of posts without any mods.

Unlike WordPress, the bbpress moderation tools are non-existant. It’s a non-issue for a micro-forum because you’ve literally got a 1 to 10 mod to user ratio. But now multiply that by 700-800 very active members. You’d then need 70 to 80 mods since every message posted has to be read by hand, by going into the thread and dealing with each one!

The ideal ratio is maybe one mod to 100 users or higher would be better, but you can’t do that without the right tools. There’s no way to browse through all posts at once and moderate immediately or setup some kind of automation process.

There’s no working badwords filter, there’s no way to limit posts that are too short or too long, there’s no post merging tool, there’s no adjustable posting rate per user, there’s no way to keep in touch with moderators. All this has to be added in with plugins, many not fully debugged yet or working correctly with 0.8.2.1 Some of them were not improved until just recently after I made feature requests after trying to use them.

It was exhausting and depressing so I took bbpress offline. But I am trying to help improve bbpress, not just complain. I think it’s about to hit critical mass with the growing number of people using it and more powerful plugins available and it has a lot of potential.

If I had a commercial forum with ads and made money off it, I’d go buy vbulletin as it’s the king and has years of trial and error and getting it right. But most people who use bbpress won’t be doing it for commercial reasons.

So that’s why I’m curious when I read that someone walked away from another forum program and switched to bbpress…