PHPbb 3 Beta

I missed this by a few months, but I was quite glad to find it :)

http://www.phpbb.com/development/

Feature list: http://area51.phpbb.com/docs/features.html

The feature list is very nice and the beta is pretty stable.
Overall I'm impressed and looking forward to the full release!

On that topic: Where could I find a tutorial on cleanly, seamlessly and properly integrating PHPbb with a web site so that it doesn't look like a whole separate thing?

After seing what happened to many websites using free forums systems it's not worth my time to set one up.

I've decided to invest in VBulletin. It seems to be the most secure paid for forum available and at £91 for the initial purchase + £30 a year renewel it seems perfect. At least it would lesson my paranoia about my forum being hacked, attacked and crap being posted all the time.

You know what would be even better? IF BRL sold me their forum system. I like these forums and how they work and would love to have one like this on my site.

There're 3 nice php forum systems I know of:

1.phpwind
http://www.phpwind.net/

2.Discuz
http://www.discuz.net/

3.BMForum
http://www.bmforum.com/

BMForum are based on UTF-8 and have many nice features, you may take a look.

phpwind/Discuz have no native Engish version, they're designed for high-volume and hi-traffic BBS.

Thanks, BMForum seems very interesting.
I'm not too fond of how the Javascript is working in menus but I guess it can be changed with a custom theme.

I'm actually fine with the risk of a free forum solution as long as I have a nice database with lots of backups and my whole site doesn't rely on it.
I have a few tricks up my sleeve for a better CAPTCHA method that could be experimented with to make it a bit more secure, anyway...

I'm using php3 on my forum at www.radioactivegamer.com/forum though it's not in use at this time. I'm still working on how I want to implement the site itself right now.

I like it much better than version 2.x... good stuff.