phpBB

What do you like best?

phpBB is a great tool for people who looking to create forum-style discussion boards. You can use the software to do a lot of things, like assign roles (mods or admins), create roleplaying lists, enable special permissions, send newsletters to your community, and create your custom content. You do need to know some basic HTML for this, because if you're doing things like creating custom widgets (sidebars or toolbars for your homepage), you have to master the use of the [][/] characters, because they are what is going to tell the coding what to do (for example, [bold][/bold] to bold words, or [hr] for a line break). It's customizable beyond what you need, and has plenty of additional options to elevate the experience you are looking to create in your community!

What do you dislike?

Using phpBB allows ads to be sneakily placed on portions of your website, and not all themes you input to your community hub will disallow ads; very few have the ability to pay for an ad-free experience, although you can definitely do it (if you use something like Forum Motion, for example. You can use credits).

Recommendations to others considering the product:

When applying themes to your website, start with basic ones, before you go about using customization options. Also, make sure to backup your saved theme before importing a new phpBB theme; without a backup, you risk loosing any unsaved components of your forum.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I'm a community manager, and having Open Source technology allows me to experiment with coding. A lot of times, other businesses or clients will use another forum-hosting service, and having some phpBB experience tells you a lot about the back-end of how forums are made by companies, and then later customized.