: phpBB requires registering and you can't embed HTML in it (why can you do
: this in WebBBS, anyway? it's amazingly unsafe), so it's harder to spam.
Not requiring registration is one of the big reason some people *like* WebBBS forums, and it's especially nice for a small, low-traffic sites like this, where many people who might come by to read and occasionally make one remark don't have to be bothered with a registration process, which (simple as it may be) often turns off many potential contributors to some forums.
And embedded HTML is useful for formatting your post as you like, especially since (in the standard threaded view) each post is one page. Though you're right that it is a security risk. I'm growing quite fond of Slashcode myself (the backend of Slashdot), with it's limited allowable HTML, single-page threaded view, anonymous non-registered posting (but you gotta register if you want a name reserved or any karma bonus), and karma/moderation system. It's doing a pretty good job with keeping sane what's probably one of, if not the, largest forums on the internet. It was a bit ugly before but the recent redesign fixed that up nicely.
My complaints about phpBB et al, and most of the forums that I see around the internet these days, is that they are non-threaded (which discourages natural topical divergence by drowning minority tangents in whatever the majority is talking about), with fixed topic categories (instead of just the one forum with user-created threads/topics), ranking systems (encouraging petty popularity contests and over-posting by people with nothing better to do), "stickies" (marking some posts as more important than others by admin discretion only), and flashy animated avatars and giant graphic sigs (all crammed onto one page since the topics aren't threaded).
Yes, I know you could theoretically do even more annoying flashy stuff on WebBBS like this, but it's much more effort to do so in raw HTML. (Though that "Optional Image URL" field at the bottom bothers me in principle and occasionally in practice). Basically, my complaint with the more popular forum types is that they're overly controlled and authoritarian, cracking down hard on the actual structure of forum activity, while simultaneously distracting its users with bread and circuses by encouraging an overflow of obnoxious graphics inserted all over the place. WebBBS goes a little too far in the other direction toward anarchy, but I grew up with UseNet so anarchy doesn't really bother me anymore, and even so, WebBBS seems a more moderate balance between forum totalitarianism and pure internet anarchy. As I said before though, Slashcode strikes an even better balance: call it populist libertarianism if you will.
(Leave it to me to turn a conversation about forum styles into a sociopolitical analogy).
