mr wrote: The, um, user interface is confusing and misdirecting. For example: On all the styles I've some across (there might be a jewel somewhere amongst all that dirt) it is ridiculously easy to accidentally post a new topic when you are going to reply. The buttons look the same and the pages where you write look the same. This leads to a lot of accidental new topics.
(.....)
And it is only on phpbb boards that I have had trouble signing in, but that might have been the admins screw-up.
I don's know much about security but I did stuble across this article http://news.com.com/Net+worm+using+Goog ... tml?tag=nl
1: The problems you're describing sound more like design flaws with the theme, than problems with the forum software itself (see point 2 for sign-in). The theme I'm going with is *very* similar to the current one. In addition, it seems fairly easy to design new ones which (if set up correctly) can be user-selectable.
2: I can't see any problems with sign-in at the moment. It works just like YaBB, but more secure (passwords are stored as MD5 hashes - case sensitive and not able to be recovered - unlike YaBB).
3: The worm you link to is apparently a flaw with PHP itself, not the forum software. That is - it's the scripting engine. In any case, I'll be sure to check with my hosting provider to ensure they've upgraded their PHP engine to fix the security vulnerability.
Shadowhawk: Thanks for providing some alternatives. PHPbb looks like the better alternative still, however.
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Current Situation:
Installing the board is the easy bit, doing a successful, complete conversion of the current board isn't easy, however.
The YaBB to PHPbb converter provided on the phpbb.com site doesn't do it's job terribly well.
I'm in the process of writing my own converter - which should, hopefully, take everything acrosss.
I've spent about 5 hours on it so far - most of that time was spent documenting how YaBB stores its data, and how things need to be set up in PHPbb.
Aside from that, I've got a about a 45% complete set of classes in VB.NET 2003 that reflect the structure of the data in a logical way, and I'm about 15% through writing the actual conversion routine.
Fortunately/Unfortunately when I write software like this I tend to go whole hog - so it'll probably end up being a completely reusable conversion tool for others converting from YaBB (or other similar text-based fora software) to PHPbb (or other similar RDBMS software). It'll just take a bit longer than a rushed 'it just works this once' script.
), there's a few other problems that I can see cropping up fairly soon. 
Took her back to mum's place on Monday and ended up hanging around all day.