My son asked for a message board on his band’s site and Lisa, who is something of a connoisseuse of message boards, recommended PHPBB. So I went and got it.
I’m very pleased to report that I followed the instructions and it ‘just worked’. Of course this is on a server with MySQL and PHP already fully debugged and running. The instructions also expect you to get from “uses MySQL” to “better create a database and an admin user before I try to setup PHPBB” on your own. Fortunately, I did, and it worked.
I did not actually customize the forum: Jeremy is a far better designer than I, but so far he’s reported no problems.