In reply to Tara.

Hi Tara,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. About costs, I agree it can be expansive to maintain a community site but for the software part both WordPress & BuddyPress are free tools, I mean we don’t charge anything for the energy and time we’ve dedicated to build the plugin.

When we’re building free and open source things we expect a lot from users so I can tell you we are trying to find the time to read your reviews, opinions, support topics, etc.., each time we can. From time to time we manage to make some understand that if they can do some more little efforts in addition to their use to help us to improve documentation, support, translation and why not the plugin’s code, that’s a big win for all of us (all users and contributors).

I agree our Support Forums needs more love. Today it’s a good tool to ask questions but not a so good one to find answers 😔. The current people contributing to it are doing a really great job, I try myself to bring some answers but we need more hands to reply and code a way to immediately gives you an answer when the question was previously asked and resolved.

Materializing key features sometimes happen 😅. I agree we don’t always succeed to include all the ideas we talked about at the launch of new development cycle, but “never” seems a bit exaggerated imho, we ship things into our major releases, I can tell you as I usually package the release and deploy it on WordPress.org 😉

I’m almost sure we never assimilated BuddyPress users to customers, but I get the idea. At least, we try to take as much feedbacks as possible in account and then we have to decide / select / choose the ones we think are making sense to most users (end users, plugin & theme authors). A good way to maximize the inclusion of you desired feature into BuddyPress core is to build it or a part of it and share a patch or a PR with us.

We’re wide open to contributions 😇.