bbPress 2.6.17 is a security and maintenance release with broad improvements to permissions, private content, subscriptions, moderation workflows, and forum counts. Everyone running bbPress should update as soon as possible. 
(You may notice 2.6.17 release follows 2.6.15. Well, I found a SQL bug right after 2.6.16 was tagged and I didn’t want to wait to get that fix out, sooooo… here we are!)
This release strengthens inherited private and hidden forum visibility, BuddyPress Group Forum boundaries, subscriber access checks, profile editing, REST API and XML-RPC requests, search results, canonical redirects, topic tags, reply moves, topic splits, and output escaping.
It also includes a substantial overhaul of count maintenance and repair tools, improving topic, reply, forum, subforum, engagement, voice, and user contribution counts across moderation, moves, merges, splits, deletion, restoration, reassignment, and simultaneous requests. Block Themes now receive first-class support while continuing to use bbPress’s PHP templates, and the Plugin Directory gains a populated WordPress Playground preview.
Developers should review the 2.6.17 upgrade notes, especially if an integration hooks bbPress creation or moderation actions for counts, filters custom statuses or count values, customizes subforum queries, or overrides form-user-roles.php.
All of these changes have also been merged into the 2.7 development branch, which is now at 2.7.0-alpha-3.
Thank you to obenland, hoangkien1020, rafiem, faran66, im_rootkid, winty, winstoncrooker, vvh1te3zz, mickey_cyberkid, phanphanhailong, hieunx91, jassbugbounty, nextdoorsec, akemi20, amedit, djsplatt, antonade, foobar7, paulos__, and nomadsyndiode for contributing reports, patches, testing, and review. Thank you for helping keep bbPress communities safe and reliable! 
Download bbPress 2.6.17 from WordPress.org, or update directly from your WordPress dashboard.
