[NCLUG] Choosing forum software

[Dan Fink]

Hello all. I work for a local Ft Collins company with a bunch of domains 
and websites. One of our sites, http://www.otherpower.com, has a hugely 
popular discussion board about alternative power and homemade wind 
generators. It currently runs on WebBBS, but the number of postings can 
be as high as 100 per day lately. WebBBS works fine, but no longer meets 
our needs. We need topic categories, user diaries, lots of variables 
that can be used in page and box templates, auto extraction of hot 
topics, photo posting by users, advanced archiving, advanced search 
capabilities with regular expressions so we can build our FAQs, polls, 
more secure accounts, email notification (WebBBS has this, but thru 
sendmail only I think--we have Qmail now) and all that other fun stuff. 
You can see our current board at: http://www.otherpower.com/cgi-bin/board.pl

The consensus of all of us at our small company (8 employees) is that we 
HATE, with a passion, the format of commercial BBS software such as UBB. 
It's slow to load, irritating, expensive, doesn't offer much new except 
for topics, and does not work on old browsers. We have many users from 
3rd-world countries who use our renewable energy site from antique 
computers and  horrific phone lines and slow speeds....it's their only 
link to what's happening in RE in the USA. So all of our sites are kept 
very simple and low on bandwidth--no frames, no Java, no shockwave. Our 
philosophy is that if you can't get the info you need from our sites 
using Lynx as your browser, we are not doing our job right!!!

Our servers are all Linux, and based at Tummy.com. We will probably have 
them install the software we choose and the relevant modules. So I'm 
hoping Sean R. might have 2 cents to put it on this question also!

We want to stick with GPL products. Software like Slashdot, Scoop and 
Squishdot seem to be just what we have in mind for this project. From 
what I've seen implemented on other forums, I kind of favor Scoop. But 
I'd sure appreciate comments from anyone that has used, installed and/or 
administrated Slash/Scoop/Squish -based forums.

Thanks!

Danbob