peterdouglas - 1:23 am on Sep 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

I put up a copy of MyBB through the installation wizard. The admin interface looks pretty intuitive, but like anything new, there will be a learning curve. I'm going to tinker around with it for a few days, and if it doesn't look like it's going to work out, I'll take it down and put up a phpbb forum (despite its shortcomings). At least there's a larger support community for it.

By low maintenance, I was referring to me not needing to crack open the source code and edit it or modifying code on a regular basis. I'm not that good at that sort of thing. I'd rather spend my time driving visitors to the site and participating in the discussions. I already have a "sister site" that I did in Wordpress, but disabled commenting (and put up a "submit your question/comment" page), so it's more like a newspaper or magazine. I did that to keep it clean and free of spamming, flame wars, etc. This bulletin board/forum I'm putting up now (on a separate URL) is to encourage members in this niche to talk amongst themselves and express themselves freely without tainting my other site or potentially posting incorrect information on it. This way, it's all contained on my forum on its own URL.

So, for now I'll play around with MyBB and see how it goes. There is a support community, though much smaller than phpbb or SMF. I think it's big enough that any issues can be addressed and taken care, yet it's not too popular that it's a popular target for hackers and spammers like the leading phpbb forums. Having said that, if MyBB doesn't work out, I'm going to use phpbb instead and brace myself for spammers and hackers and everything else that goes with it (good and bad). Hey, none of these can be THAT bad - there are lots of these forums in use all over the Internet.