Drupal forums

Drupal provides a lot of functionality out of the box. Sometimes a better implementation can be found with contributed modules. And sometimes it's not just a question of something better - the stock functionality is just not up to par with what users have come to expect.

The forum module is a good example of an area of Drupal where stock functionality just doesn't do it. A lot of people probably manage to use blogs or stories instead of forums quite well, and frankly you just don't see that many forums these days. Be that as it may, they have their place, at least in the mind of many clients. So if a client wants a forum, you quite likely have to give them a forum.

Even getting the stock forum module to work properly can be a bit of a challenge. If you don't have a vocabulary term set up for a forum it probably won't work ("Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in drupal/modules/forum/forum.module" - see http://drupal.org/node/324672 for an option). You might have issues with having forums show up on the list of forums created.

Then once it's made it's beyond spartan. You have to do some fairly serious theming to get it to be presentable.

What are alternative options?

Advanced Forum
Advanced Forum is certainly an option. It provides extra functionality, a nice look, documentation and responsive help.

phpBB integration
My friend and fellow Drupaler said "I have also tried an integration of phpBB and Drupal and it seemed to work. The reason to use phpBB would be for even more advanced forum features, which I don't know whether lots of people are using, like selective quoting, better email integration. Don't know how important that would be for any particular user community."