twist - 5:40 am on Jul 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

My 1 cent,

The problem with phpbb is it does too much, a lot of overhead, a whole lot of overhead. Phpbb does everything under the sun almost, and what it can't do, there are mods that will. The problem is there are a million phpbb forums on the internet. Most have the same bland boring look, also, most are empty. To make your phpbb look different/original can take a lot of work and time. You could get a phpbb template but no matter what template you pick it also has already been used a thousand times.

Beyond just the look of a forum they can be a lot of work. Building a forum can take a lot of time with little payoff at first. Even if your lucky enough to get your forum off the ground you could end up spending an hour or more a day deleting spam from it. It already sounds like your trying to take on a whole mess of things.

I would suggest that instead of trying to start with a forum you start with a comment area under the articles you write. The article gives people something to write about and doesn't have all the overhead like a forum would. No logins, cookies, dynamic addresses, or people starting flame wars. If people leave a comment you don't like just delete it, only maintenance required.

Not that you couldn't add a forum later, it just seems with all the stuff your trying to take on it would end up consuming a lot of your time. You should focus your time on a new site on things like SEO, setting up compression and things like that.