I was wanting to use BBPress but I have had the same problem (WP 3.8.2). No settings showing up at all in the Dashboard. After trying to resolve this I have just hit a brick wall and I am not going to disable all my plugins and/or abandon some plugins.

And yes, I note in all the forum threads a hint of arrogance and dismissiveness on the part of the developers. And there is NOTHING in the setup instructions on how to get around/warn about these issues.

So I will not be using BBPress.

[@netweb Keymaster 10 years, 6 months ago]

With the 30,000+ plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory bbPress does it’s best to be compatible with as many as we can, sometimes conflicts happen.

It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to deactivate your other plugins one by one until you see the bbPress menus active which will then give you the name of the plugin causing the conflict and allow you to re-enable the other plugins you have disabled.

Once you have the name of the plugin we can try to work out why there is a conflict and without the name of the plugin we have no hope of knowing what the issue is.