Okay, I will say this outright: the forum is horrible. It doesn't thread well, it's hard to follow, there's no PMing. IMO this is why it is used so very little.

I am on a LOT of internet forums, and >50% of them use phpbb forum software. There are good reasons for this: it's easy, it's customizable, th elayout is intuitive and IT WORKS. There's verification (very little spam on the boards I frequent, far less than TSD gets). You can have subforums, including private ones that are restricted to members or subsets of members. And yes, there's a PM function as well as a"sticky" so that important messages can be stuck to the top of the message list.

Look into it; I know amateurs who are acting as forum webmasters for some of these places, so it can't be that hard.

JC

My own website runs on Drupal:
www.clanofthegreywolf.com
Maybe we should consider rolling out a new site?

As gallamine pointed, we've continued the discussion over on the other thread. I'm going to post your comment there. Jeff (jcs) and I and possibly Otto will likely work the redesign. We'll continue discussion over there.