Bulletin Boards

[#1]

My site is hosted elsewhere but the PN community is usually so helpful I thought I'd ask here.
I used to have a bulletin board but when my user community started falling out I took it down. It was a bit of pain anyway as I was using phpBB which was quite clunky and a nightmare on security to stop robots trying to join.
my hosts recommend Yabbforum, the PN SMF solution seems good,
Any recommendations or ones to avoid. I can write a bit of HTML but I need the idiots guide for any other stuff
Thanks

[#2]

I'd go for SMF, I've not heard much from YaBB for a while now, but it's maybe just because I haven't been looking.

[#3]

Quote from: James_H

From a install/security/modifying/skinning etc POV, I know Colin was very much in favour of SMF over the other options.

These days, phpBB is as secure as a house with no doors...ok so my analogy sucks, but it's not very secure.
Skinning-wise, SMF is a bit of a pain because of the amount of embedded presentational code within the HTML outputs, but if I guess that comes down to preference more than anything.
Some aspects of administration I prefer phpBB (the banning system from what I recall was better than SMFs current one), but overall I'd say SMF again.

[#4]

Sold!
Thanks very much - another forum I post on recommended Punbb as a simpler less demanding board but I think SMF is the winner for me.
I'll probably be posting over the w/e when I set it up and it all goes pete tong (as they used to say).

[#5]

I run a popular phpBB with two 'official' MODs:
- vastly improved CAPTCHA display (colours etc)
- double activation (which I know doesn't suit boards on which guests can post, but for boards for clubs / societies etc with memberships and where only members can post the mod is magic: the first stage of account activation is the usual one where the intending user has to respond to an email; the second stage is approval by the administrator against - in our case - a membership list which contains email addresses (we could automate this, but we often get spouses or children of members registering; we are happy to let these go through but this would be difficult to automate)
After an initial flurry of barred attempts to register by spammers or spambots, we rarely (once every two months or so) get one which circumvents CAPTCHA - and it then get barred by the administrator.
Note that phpBB V2 seems to have been stabilized at the very solid 2.0.22 for none months. The substantially different and much more functional PhpBB V3 is on release candidate 5. If I was installing now, I think I would go for V3 unless I was installing a vanilla (no MODs) V2. 

[#6]

I run a couple of sites using phpBB, while there are a couple of nice things about SMF, I still perfer phpBB for some reason .. though I guess it's often targeted by hackers/spammers because it's so common.
Though I've not tried using the SMF admin panel, so if I did try administering a board using that then maybe I'd change my mind
Neither of the sites are that busy, may get a couple of posts per day. Managed to get spam signups though as soon as I registered a domain, so I installed this anti-spam mod (Anti-Spam ACP) which has stopped the one or two signups I get per day.
It's got an improved Captcha, and logs the spam signups in the admin panel as well. Stop all the dodgy regs so far, but then again now I've said that