Yah there’s a bbPress Google sitemap plugin:
* http://boakes.org/talk/topic/sitemap-plugin-for-bbpress (the original, I believe)
* https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bbpress-sitemap-generator/ (I think this is an updated version)
I tried the earlier version, and it turned out that it regenerated a sitemap on every topic created/edited/deleted. This created a lot of overhead on my server, and slowed the process of posting a topic down to a crawl.
It may work better now on that front? It’d be awesome if there was a way to have topic creation add an item to a queue somewhere, and then have the backend process the queue periodically (at a later point) to update the sitemap. That way, the process of creating a topic itself doesn’t get slowed down.
Maps like that should never be done in real-time while the user waits but behind the scenes with a cron.
On very active sites though, I’ve never found the need for a map. Google seems to find EVERYTHING.
I think maps just make webmasters of smaller sites feel better (and give SEO’s something to charge for).
I turned that plugin off long ago as well (but sometimes run it manually), because as the forum grew, it was taking longer and longer to regenerate the sitemap, as the visitor waited, as _ck_ said. The Google XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress doesn’t have that problem, but I have no idea what makes it different.
@_ck_: Yah I couldn’t agree more that this would ideally be done with a cron.
@chrishajer: The Google XML Sitemap isn’t done in realtime (unless you set it to do that), but it sure can take a long time! I have 14,804 pages in our WordPress blog and according to the admin logs, the last SiteMap “building process took about 7893.94 seconds to complete and used 44.5 MB of memory.” That’s 13+ minutes!
Wow…I sure hope that figure of 7893 seconds represents wall time and not CPU usage.
It sounds like both of these plugins are currently best suited for smaller-scale applications, which means they’ll be fine for me (for now at least). But yeah, that overhead is something to keep an eye on.
Thanks.
Yah the site was still up and running that whole time. I not-so-intelligently generated the sitemap at 11 pm, when it still has a decent amount of traffic.
Personally, I would use the WordPress SiteMap generator but not the bbPress one. Or at least, use the bbPress one only until you notice that it’s starting to slow down the posting process…
I decided to give the bbPress plugin another chance. I installed it and tried creating a new topic… the browser was thinking for a looong time. I eventually stopped the process, deactivated the plugin, and created a new topic — that one was created very quickly.
It could be an issue with the permissions of my sitemap.xml, although I am pretty sure I 777’d it properly.
As for size of the forum, it’s significant but not huge. Thanks to ck’s awesome Mini Stats plugin, I can give you the exact stats: ~11k Topics and ~75k posts.
Just thought I’d share an update. 
