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I am sure this question is best asked to the site admins, but I'll toss it out here to everyone in case others have had experience with it.

I'm looking to add a discussion board to a website I maintain, and I am considering using phpBB - the setup used here on BN. From an end user perspective this is a wonderful setup, but I'm curious from the admin side how easy is it to set up and administer?

My biggest questions are easy of setup, ease of integration into the general look and feel of the site (incorporating the masthead for BN along the top of the messageboard pages) and ease of general admin (setting up new topic areas, deleting posts, deleting/banning problem users, etc.)

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

The phpBB backup process can produce a file that's too large. Some ISP's limit the file size that a user (phpBB admin) is allowed to upload.

There are ways around it. I usually use the database control panel provided by the ISP and save the tables individually.

Often the largest table is the search terms. If it's so large that the ISP will not allow it to be uploaded, users will not be able to search very far back in the forums.

I don't have a lot of experience administering other forum software so I can't really compare it. As a yes/no question? Yes, I would use phpBB.

check and see what your ISP recommends - some perfer SMF, not that they won't let you use phpBB, in the past it has been known to cause more vulnerability on a shared server. Or so I was told by my ISP.

I used phpbb for a while a few years back and found it hard to administrate but then I was a complete noob.

I now use SMF - which is the same as www.phinpower.org. It's easy to set up and administrate and the majority of updates are just a push button process. When I used phpBB you had to make modifications to the actual code, that may have changed by now.

Thanks for the insight.

I'll have to take a look at SMF and see what it looks like and then check with the site host has to say about their preference.