I am totally new, new to everything to do with punbb

You need the forum software. You can get it at http://punbb.org/downloads.php (and yes, it's free).

You'll be download a file that is compressed in some fashion. Once you uncompress it, you'll want to upload the contents of the upload folder.

< 1 MB, for the PHP and images anyway

What kind of information are you looking for?

It means you can get email notifications when someone posts in the topic

As I said, the steps are as follows:
1. Download a copy of PunBB
2. Uncompress it
3. Upload the contents of the folder named "upload" to the server
To install, you simply go to your browser and type the address where you uploaded it to and add install.php at the end (so if my site is named mynewsite.com and I uploaded the files to the "forum" folder, I would browser to http://mynewsite.com/forum/install.php). Enter the details it asks for and PunBB will install. You then need to copy the text the script generates (it generates a PHP script), save the text as config.php, and upload it to the same place you uploaded all the other files

PHP is run by the server when you browse to the page in your browser.

That's something your host's control panel should allow you to do, create a MySQL database and user

MySQL is a database system that PunBB uses (PostgreSQL and SQLite are two others). They need to be installed on your server (your host most likely installed them, you wouldn't be able to, they're actual applications) or you can't use PunBB.

Ok. Thanks guys. You have other suggestions for forums and/or messageboards?

Hi,
I got (or have just found...) a webhosting that has php and my sql. Will it work in PunBB? And I have a question: I am blind and use a screenreader. Do you think that any of punbb's functions will work with a screenreader?
Thanks,
Andy

Hi,
I have something else:
Lets say, when you browse to the website, you need to click, for example, a link that says "forum." I can do:
<a href="http://xxx.com">forum</a>

So in the xxx part, what address do I put so it can link?
Thank you,
Andy

Hi,
When I tried to install punbb with the webhost called zendurl
http://zendurl.com
is their site, I received this error at the end:
PunBB / Error

An error was encountered
Error: Unable to write configuration cache file to cache directory. Please make sure PHP has write access to the directory 'cache'.

So now what...

Hi, how do you chmod that? For example, how do I set the permissions so that php can do what it has to do? And also, how do I go about doing this, what programs/tools do I need for this chmod thing?

What ftp clients can I use that are free because I use ie6 which obviously doesn't have that. So what kind of clients can I use for this?

How did you know I had Jaws...
In any case I do. I am gonna try smartftp because I saw that on google as well, first result that came up.

And now... Once I get this whole thing up and running, how and what can I do with the adminastrative interface? For example: delete users (very harsh move...), delete posts (something useful for getting rid of spam posts), and closing topics (would be cool if you want to say, "paws off this topic..."), add ranks (new member, advanced, guru, etc.). And finally: the ability to separately custimize ranks. Example: Mike: new member. But the admin wants to be something else... Whatever; just something cool to have. Actually I should'vr put that in the "suggestions" forum but...
And also how do you make forums? For example: gaming is one forum, game news another, off-topic is another...
Thank you guys,
Andy

i believe they do; I haven't met someone who doesn't use ie for ftp. And... Well... I am having problems getting jaws to read the textboxes in smartftp, it just says "edit." which means an edit field; no label of anything I haveto write. So now what can I do?
Regards
Andy