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I recently stumbled upon this interesting page, where some of the hardware behind some of the biggest vBulletin etc forums is highlighted:

http://www.big-boards.com/servers.php

There were no punBB forums on that list.

It is an interesting list, if only due to the way it reveals how some (relatively) small vBulletin forums seem to need pretty awesome clusters of hardware behind them - 6 front-end servers, 4 DB servers, etc etc.

Scary stuff, due to the extra $$$ and sysadmin complexity this implies.

It highlights some of the architectures people used to cope with high traffic - separate web and DB servers, separate static file/attachment/image servers, load-balancers etc.

It also underlines (to me) the importance of planning for growth if you have a forum in a topic that has broad appeal, although I presume that (if you don't load it up with too many mods and tweaks) a punBB forum should in general scale better than for eg a VB one - ie the threshold point where you would need to start thinking about kicking in some big iron to ensure good performance in a punBB board should be quite a bit higher than it may be for vb or phpBB.

Out of curiosity, can anyone running a big punBB board tell us their hardware specs?

I tried to find one, but maybe I didn't look hard enough.

I was seeking a simple 'front-door' anti-spam mod that would add into the punBB user registration form a feature I've seen around the place on other forums, and some blogs too.

This feature presents as a simple text only form element that asks the user a simple question.

Ones I've seen include:

'Are you human?' Yes|No, with no as the default, asked one phpPP forum or
'What does 2+2' = ?,  or
'My name is Joe Smith. What are my initials?'

Are there any views on how effective this approach is?

And is there perhaps a punmod that implements something akin to this?

It's certainly not likely to be foolproof, of course. But it's simplicity : probable effectiveness ratio appeals to me, as opposed to a graphic CAPTCHA, Akismet plugins etc.

If there's no pre-existing mod, how hard would it be to just directly code such a question into register.php, manually changing the values from time to time?

I know this is a bit lame of me, but I am all thumbs in SQL or PHP.

Could I ask for some advice and coding help from folks with more experience of both?

There is a code hack on the Punres wiki to allow another sort option within the Admin interface -  to allow admins to specify that specific topics should display topic posts in reverse order:

viz:
http://wiki.punres.org/Sort_topics_in_reverse_order

Could someone advise me how to modify it to allow alphabetical sorting of topic posts?

I think I am on the right path by working from the hack posted in the punres wiki.

Could this work:
(a) creating a new option value '3' for 'Alphabetical' in admin_forums.php:
viz:

<option value="3"<?php if ($cur_forum['sort_by'] == '3') echo ' selected="selected"' ?>>Alphabetical</option>

and then
(b) modifying viewforum.php to add a new 'else if' declaration like so:

} else if ($cur_forum['sort_by'] == '3') {
    $newsort = 'natsort';
}

and then
(c) doing the rest of the replacements suggested for viewforum.php so that the SQL queries pick up the newsort variable?

But would 'natsort' be the right thing to work here? I thought another 'ORDER BY DESC' would be right.

I am muddling towards implementation of the feature request I raised recently:
http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=15585
which has had no response from anyone so far, alas.