Tuesday, March 02, 2010 - 09:19 pm, by: Maclean Cherry(Maclean_cherry)
Just saw this and thought I'd throw my 2c in.
I'm relatively new but do have a fair bit of experience running forums and get to use most of the available software through my job.
New Posts: People are saying it works well? It runs off a cookie stored on your computer. Awesome except if you access the site from more than one computer. That means if I log on from my laptop and then from my PC the same threads are still new.
ToolTips: If you want to make the forum easier to use, include tooltips on the functions. Things like inserting a link or editing a post aren't obvious without clicking on each button and waiting to see what it does.
Avatars and signatures: Any new forum software will give you the option to disable these.
If you want to keep it free, check out PHPBB as already mentioned. You may not already have MySQL databases available, you can get hosting that comes with it for about $3/month. If you can't find suitable hosting send me an email and I'll host the site for you $5/month on one of my VPS's.