[GRaduns340]

I've had bad experience with Proboards. It's not near as customizable as I would have liked, and like some people said, it's not as widely used an supported as others.

I installed SMF on the Team 340 site over the summer. I highly recommend it. I haven't had any problems with it yet - aside from the one time I accidentally changed the DB password and forgot to change it on the forum config first, but that was obviously my fault. SMF seems to have the clear advantage in publishing community as well. I have seen countless mods for SMF, and even worked with a dev team for one myself for a short time. It's pretty easy to find anything you need for it.

As for the lack of use on most team forums, ours are getting quite a bit of use. We used to have communication spread out over 2 or 3 different sources, but now that our leader has decided he likes the forum, he has made that the official source of everything. I think we've averaged almost 10 posts/day this month. One nice feature that most people don't know about, but is very nice if you do, is the newsletter function. It allows administrators (or those with permission) to send newsletters out to anyone who has registered for the forum. SMF will be coming out with the full release version 1.1 soon (mid-October), so I might just wait until then to do it if that's the route you decide to take, or you can install the current release now and upgrade later.

One other note on Proboards: They use phpbb, but since they host it for you, they limit a lot of the functions, while expanding some mods. I think if you like the feel of Proboards, you should just install phpbb on your own space. That does require PHP and MySQL on the server, though, as does SMF and nearly any other forum software.