For years I have been using phpBB for a busy community website that has over 162490 registered members. It has been a great ride, members are happy with the functionality and ease of use BUT from a development and security point of view it has been a painful experience.

As anyone who has ever installed, hacked and setup phpBB forum will tell you that due to the lack of hooks or modular nature of phpBB you have to hack core to add any additional functions. Prior to Drupal this was "acceptable loss" to me, but I have "come to my senses" and it is something that I would hate to do now.

For one of the work websites (www.mychild.co.uk) that is currently running on Drupal 5, we decided to expand the website and expand it to incorporate a forum. Fun times!! After much deliberation and discussions about pros and cons of each package, here is a "must have" that we decided upon:

Must have features

• Forums must share the same login as Drupal site
• MUST look and feel like a phpBB/VB forum
• Private Messenging
• Private Forums (moderate only - access by role)
• Email notifications of updates/comments
• Avatars
• Post count (in profile and forum posts)
• Star Ranking (based on post count)
• Rank Badge (based on role)
• Custom folder icons (keeping the look and feel close to phpBB)
• New posts since last visit
• Custom breadcrumb
• Banner blocks
• Ability to cross promote other drupal content types (based on term relationships)
• Attachments in comments (with limit)
• Quote
• Banwords
• Offsite links open in a new window
• Advanced search

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