Does Not Uninstall Cleanly, Seems Intentionally Difficult to Remove User Roles

I like to give plugin authors the benefit of the doubt and a chance to give some input before I leave a bad review, but I cannot do that this time. Installing BBpress messed up the layout of our site, but I understand that how the installation goes down will be different for every site. I don’t fault them for this at all. It just basically didn’t work out for us so we uninstalled it.

What I DO fault BBpress for and do hold them accountable to is leaving lingering user roles after you uninstall them. Some of these roles you can easily remove in the admin sidebar, but other ones like “keymaster” have NO checkbox and you cannot easily remove them.

OK, first, when you uninstall something it should not leave trace elements lying around. That is just lazy. Second, if you cannot bother to remove everything after someone uninstalls your plugin, you should at least make it easy for the user to clean up the mess themselves. Making certain user roles unselectable is the exact opposite of this. For the record, I have never had this issue of a plugin leaving lingering traces of itself in the backend ever (having dealt with well over 100 plugins).

I did some research into the topic and found this forum post where on of the plugin authors say:

The reason [the ‘feature’ of uninstalling all user roles] doesn’t exist is because the audience for this is relatively small compared to users asking for other things. Right now, I see 3 people that need this. That’s not saying it’s trivial, but it’s non-urgent.

Mind you, as of posting this, that was 1 year and 7 months ago. That is to say that in over a year and half of having this problem put in front of their faces that they have done nothing to resolve it. And if you search “how to uninstall bbpress roles” you will find many other posts from frustrated users around the internet that complain of the same exact thing.

Having a clean uninstall is not supposed to be requested FEATURE of your plugin, but a REQUIREMENT. It is irresponsible to leave lingering traces of your plugin around for users to clean up themselves after uninstall, and downright insulting to make these lingering elements difficult to remove after doing so. What’s more is that knowing for this flaw in your software for well over a year and half and not resolving it basically shows me as a user that you somehow want to give the middle finger to anyone who dares uninstall BBpress.

Thankfully, someone made a plugin called Delete bbpress roles that lets you install, active, deactive and uninstall it and takes the bbpress roles away along with it. I did this entire process flawlessly within 2 minutes. It is hard for me to believe that a single developer can make such a simple plugin so easily (this is that person’s only plugin) while a robust team like BBpress that has multiple developers with multiple plugins cannot make a few simple lines of code to do a clean uninstall–lines of code which should have been there before the plugin was even open to the public.

This is why I have written this review before making a ticket. I also refuse to make an account on your site to ask this as I will most likely just be shuffled around just to have nothing happen like “only 3 users” who notified you of this issue a year and 7 months ago.