First forum software i thought of was phpBB. It’s free, it’s popular, everyone knows about it. It’s also extremely complicated (from the admin look of things) and creating templates from scratch can be hard and time consuming. We started looking for other alternatives and we came across one called bbPress, which is a nice little lightweight forum. Very simplistic and minimalistic. Problem is, it hardly comes with any features built in. Out-of-the-box, it doesn’t support:

• custom avatars
• attachments
• signatures
• post count
• ability to display members online
• bbcode
• private messaging
• polls
• smilies/emoticons
• topic icons
• post preview
• ability to report post
• display unread posts.

That’s right. From a clean installation, bbPress doesn’t have any of that. Features that are common in even the most obscure php based bulletin boards. bbPress, however, does support plugins. And guess which features i listed above are available in plugins? All of them! Which means people who were willing to use bbPress had to go and manually find (Or write their own!) the plugin they want, download it, upload it to the proper folder via FTP, then activate it from inside bbPress. Repeat this process for every single plugin to cover basic features that other bulletin boards have from the get-go. Oh, let’s not forget that if a bbPress update were to come out, there’s a good chance that upon upgrading, you’ll find half of your plugins malfunctioning and/or completely dysfunctional. At least the community is a little more helpful than a certain other plugin.

So for all the work of modifying the theme and uploading a ton of plugins just to do basic shit, we’re moving back to phpBB. It’s just not worth it.

I do salute you, mr/mrs. developer, who may have spent countless hours of their own time, writing plugins for such a shameful excuse of a bulletin board. Let’s just hope your plugin doesn’t spontaneously combust if a bbPress update were to come out.