http://bobafett.com/boards/

For a site dedicated to the bounty hunter from Star Wars, and online since 1996, PunBB has been a great tool for focusing on content first, features second.

Speaking of features, popular with the site's members are the preferred stylesheet options, the after-thought edit, the ease of moderation, and the overall ease of usability. I'm running only three modifications -- Reputation/Karma, Private Messaging, and RSS -- all of which are huge hits.

I also have some external queries to the database, to show off our top 10 lists: posters, topic starters, karma, and topics. I also have latest user to post, active topics and newest topics pulled to our home page.

Because it works so well, the user management of PunBB is also the core of our site. I use integration bridges with Coppermine for users to upload images to our site. I was also looking at bridges for Mediawiki (and Dokuwiki), but they're not far enough along in development.

Finally, since the message boards were recently been hit hard with spam registrations, I resorted to Googling an answer -- this forum is a little hard to follow -- and am giving AntiBot a try.