I built a website and forum nearly a year ago, and both get moderate to heavy traffic… However, due to numerous glitches and the lack of platform support, I’ve lost 50% of my traffic and subscribers… And it’s getting worse by the day.

Has anyone found a reliable source for resolving technical issues or an alternative platform?

I’ll be due to renew all of my premier Word Press packages in 2 months, but We’ve started looking for alternative platforms to migrate to, because it seems easier than getting support for WP and bbPress.

My WP plan is the best available and it includes support, but the technicians really don’t seem to care much about helping, and the ones that do, wind up not being able to.

If I can’t fix the little glitches that have been haunting me for a year, I don’t see any point in renewing.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 5 years, 4 months ago]

You won’t get much advice about other forum software in these forums, as these forums are for bbPress (not against it.)

The support in these forums is all volunteer based. No one gets paid to be around to help. Everyone is passionate, but no one is obligated. We have great moderators that keep things clean, but your experience is not uncommon – it helps to be your own site admin.

I see you’ve created 6 topics here, 1 of them was asking for some code help, and 2 of them (including this one) are general gripes with (not) getting things working how you’d like them to without anything really to say back?

bbPress is intentionally simple forum software. It’s opinionated but flexible, so you get a pretty basic experience out of the box, but it requires a bit of determination to customize it to do exactly what you want it to.

You’re right that most hosting providers are generally disinterested in helping with websites themselves; they’re in the business of making sure websites work, so they’re not spending much time deep into how plugins and themes look or feel or work with one another. They’ll probably redirect you back here for most bbPress questions.

If you’re the only person running your community, and you’re unable to keep things working on your own, I can understand why you feel the way you do. I can tell you that bbPress.org runs an unmodified version of bbPress that has required very little ongoing maintenance. All we’ve done here is create a WordPress theme to make things feel a little bit more like a forum than a blog. Together with WordPress.org we do have 11 million user accounts and a high volume of concurrent users across multiple different forums.

It sounds like your forums might be more active than ours here, but it’s hard to know exactly what glitches and problems you’re having, and most things aren’t as easy as coding a snippet for you and having you drop it in someplace.

I’m sorry that your experience with bbPress hasn’t been pleasant. I’m not sure what more to say, other than if you keep with it and keep learning, it is a very capable and fun piece of software that helps hundreds of thousands of communities run really smoothly. Hopefully that continues to include yours!