Oh how I wish there were a better way to rate themes and plugins. grrr. Personally, bbpress gets a fantastic 5 star rating from me because like you, James Huff, I’ve used it for a looong time and really love it.
Unfortunately, the open nature of the themes and plugins and the popularity of WordPress means it only takes seconds to install a theme or plugin. And for some, it likewise only takes seconds for an opinion to be reached that it “sucks” because it requires the extremely complicated process of reading the documentation, changing a configuration setting and, in some cases, a little bit of tweaking to work with a particularly customized theme.
I will admit that I made three or four tries of installing bbPress and it wasn’t until the second or third time I was able to finally get it to appear on my site (it dawned on me that forum and forums were two different things and creating a page named the wrong one meant no bbPress on my site). I also quickly learned that simply ‘activating’ bbPress doesn’t (and won’t) magically make a forum appear on my site out of thin air.
Since then I have learned to be patient. Read the documentation. Ask questions and ask for help politely. And then wait for help to come calling. And miraculously I got more help from people than I ever expected. I also learned that if a theme or plugin has an overwhelming majority of 5-Star ratings, then I knew it was much less likely the plugin “didn’t work” than the reality that it “didn’t work for me” because _I_ was doing something wrong. Usually fixing it was so simple I learned how to insure it never happened again.
