Looking for message board/forum/something for site

[PhunkyMonkey]

I am building a new site for my church, and would like to have an area for the student ministry (middle & high school) to be able to leave messages. There are not many people so it does not need to be anything big... if I do put up a large forum I might set it up for all of the church to use, with a section for the youth.

Even something as simple as a guestbook would work (they were using something like that before), but the guestbook from here that I've used before got a lot of spam. If nothing else, I may sign-up for a Live-Journal community, where there are no ads. I would love to avoid ads if I could (because the content might be questionable for a church site), but I am also looking for something that is free, so I'm not expecting too much.

I know html and a tiny bit of php, but nothing more extensive than that.

Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations??

[Adam]

I'm no expert but from a user-point of view a lot of websites I visit use phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com/) which is a quite user-friendly bulletin board program, and apparently from the admin side of things, fully customisable. It has user-accouts so that'd stop the spam.

I do recall someone here saying it wasn't very friendly on the servers however, although I could be wrong.

Maybe you already know about it, or it's too much for what you need, but worth a shot :)

[Arthur]

A warning about phpBB - it has a quite a history of security problems. If you're going to use phpBB you have to really be on top of things and install updates as soon as they're released. (of course, the same applies to any software you install - you have to keep it up-to-date)

-Arthur

[Evoir]

vBulletin costs $170 for a licence. Very much worthwile. You get great support, great admin tools, and the whole church can use it. I highly reccomend spending the money and doing it right. :)

[Evoir]

Have you looked at PunBB? it's really quite sweet. And simple. And elegant.

[PhunkyMonkey]

I actually ended up using phpBB. A friend had recommended it and I had looked at the site before someone mentioned it on here, so I thought I would look into it more. I have it set up, which was really easy, but do not have it accessible to others yet.

[Matt]

I have to caution you about phpBB... for security reasons I would recommend implementing the non-machine readable "confirmation code" security feature and manually review each registration request before approving it. This is not a fool-proof method, but should significantly reduce the probability that one of your members intends to hack your board. If you're serious about forums, go with vBulletin. -Matt

[Jirsh]

If you want it to be easy, just use a php board www.phpBB.com. Its easy to download, implement and update. The security is ok as long as you keep your versions up to date.