Hey everyone! I got a nudge from @jeffr0 that this thread had some replies, and I just wanted to chime in and say thank you, very much, for being patient.
I understand everyone’s feelings. I get where they come from.
bbPress is a 15 year old piece of forum software based on and specifically for WordPress. The last thing it will ever do is die. (That’s a terrible play on words, but keep reading!)
The GPL (and it being open-source in general) guarantee everyone that as different people use it, different people will contribute to it, and it will continue to grow, evolve, and be iterated on in perpetuity.
It being based entirely on WordPress gives it one of the largest and most stable foundations to be built off of.
The projects spiritual commitment to backwards compatibility through the years means that as the software grows, your content will always grow with it.
Other forum projects have made sweeping changes without migration paths from old to new versions. bbPress as a project simply appreciates and respects its users and their communities and content too much to not provide great tools to scale your community along with the software.
bbPress as a project gets developed in bursts. Like it or not, I think that’s the honest truth. If you look at its life as a piece of software as a whole, there is a ton of evidence to support the idea that sometimes a few months will go by with nothing, and then a few months will go by with tons of activity.
The dips might make your stomach drop at first, but it’s a long ride… a fun ride… and one that I hope others see from a distance as a beautiful effort. One that provides a platform that empowers WordPress users to give their visitors a simple, clean, and dedicated place to enjoy communicating with each other.
Lastly… strictly on numbers alone, WordPress.org relies heavily on bbPress as the primary method of communication & support for over 75k plugins in 200 languages, and 11 million registered users. bbPress is actively installed in over 340k websites. It’s a fraction of the total WordPress installs (but if the numbers on builtwith and other tools are accurate) it is currently the most widely installed piece of forum software in the world.
bbPress will never die. It will only get better.
Thank you, everyone, again, for being patient and for your interest in bbPress. It’s a pretty cool piece of software with some of the best contributors and forum moderators around! I’m working on bbPress everyday, sometimes in my head, and sometimes on other projects that bbPress will inherit someday. It’s always on my mind, even if the commit log doesn’t show it. 💕
