I'm building a website for the Portland Oregon area for events and stuff like that and have a few questions about your forums. PM me or we can chat here if you don't mind.

Here are a few sample questions maybe somebody here can answer.

1.) Is this a phpbb?
2.) is there a template available?
3.) How do you link the forums, like in the Hometown, how did you list list the home towns than have them pop up into their own forums with new categories and topics?
4.) How did you get the menu bar at the top with Communities/AR15/AK47/Handgun etc... Is that a part of the template you are using or custom coding?

Anyway, if you or anyone can help me at all that would be great.

Ra

I'll answer this for you:

It's homebrew. GoatBoy coded it from scratch.

1. No
2. No
3. Server-side scripting is a beautiful thing.
4. View source.

why not try out vbulletin or similar?  they have some limited option versions you can run that are free or near that.  

Use Phpbb format cause the Vbulletin sites get hacked alot.

vbulletin is pretty powerful - very customizable, and fairly secure. I ran a huge bulletin with it.

Quoted: Use Phpbb format cause the Vbulletin sites get hacked alot.

i cant remember any of the vb sites i'm on getting hacked...
ls1tech.com hasnt to my knowledge.  and its at 100k users with a search index dating back to day 1 or near it.

Personally i prefer Vbulletin over PHPBB...

php in general is sloppy and full of holes. Either phpbb or vbulletin can get hacked. One has to keep up with the patches. Still - I ran one of the top paintball forums and we had a LOT of enemies - but the forum I dont believe was ever hacked. At least not on my watch.