Chat Board Software?

[cd34]

phpbb.com isn't bad. Certainly has its quirks, but, is free, has a large userbase (which means security holes are found reasonably quickly).

Until recently -- roughly vb 3.5 or so, they were roughly the same performance. vb handled attachments poorly, phpbb did a pretty good job. Where phpbb was a pain for moderators, vb had moderation down to a science.

You could start with phpbb, and there is an importer.

There used to be a system by the midgard people that actually was a 'community portal in a box'. The problem with midgard is that to get it performing well, you need the apache module version, which is an issue if you aren't able to install modules. But, their community portal was almost perfect for housing associations, small towns, etc.

You might also consider one of the CMSs that has a forum built in (along with a lot of other features) so that you can do scheduling, news, event announcements, etc. Personally, I don't like phpnuke, but, there is postnuke.com. Drupal isn't too bad. Mambo is another alternative along with Joomla, but, Mambo takes a bit of cpu horsepower and does seem to get hit with security releases a little more frequently, but, has a pretty good setup.

You can also head to cmsmatrix.org, narrow the search, and checkbox the options you're looking for and it'll narrow down the field. Its a little biased towards WebGUI as it is maintained by plainblack, but, short of that, it is a pretty good tool to narrow the search. WebGUI is not bad if you have mod_perl and the ability to do a few server tweaks.