Anyone any advice on forum software? I figure most people here have grown up from owning a spectrum or amiga, so it's probably a good bet lots of us have a bit more tech knowledge than the average bear.

I am setting up a forum for a project my wife is doing and looking into forum options. I have pretty good experience with css and wordpress and run a few basic sites, but never done a forum or any serious php coding.

From a user perspective it has to be very clean and simple. Prospective users will probably have no experience with forums so I would like it to basically look big and simple, with the possibility of switching off those control panel options which sometimes stretch on for 3 or 4 pages.

From admin perspective, like i said – i'm used to wordpress but find it's a bit of a double edged sword. It's open source so I don't mind adding functionality with plugins, but at least with wordpress i try not to add too many plugins because of update/compatibility/speed issues.

I have got it down to simple:press as used here, bbpress which is made by wordpress guys, and phpbb which is probably the most popular free platform.

Anyone any exprerience with these or with launching a forum?

bbpress looks promising because it seems simple and lean, but i'm not sure how robust it would be (though saying that, lots of commercial sites still use wordpress). While phpbb has been around a while and could probably handle anything, but every phpbb site i've seen looks identical to the others and that scrunched up 'throw shit loads of data at the user' is not the look i'm after.

I wonder why MLG didn't use bbpress? Was it even available when this forum was created?

Any thoughts would be appreciated – this is totally new ground for me and i can't think of anything worse for a fledgling forum than shutting it down for a few days while i switch platform.