I see this bulletin board thing here is pretty new.  Why use SMF when phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com/ ) is also open-source, PHP and free, why use one have skalfa gone for one which seems to be less powerful?

I agree that you don't need anything too fancy, but you say your self that you need an easy way to communicate.  Now, as far as I can see, unless you know HTML there is no easy way to do very simple things like:
<ul>
<li>bulleted-lists</li>
<li>bold</li>
<li>italic</li>
</li>

phpBB has all those features made very easy to use.

I just don't see why you choose to have a poorer quality system than you could have for the same price (since they are both free).

Ah, now that's better!  I'm very glad now, and I must apologise, since it was a user error since I had not read the help.  A couple of questions still:

• Why is it that all I see above this post when writing it is a list of smiley icons, yet in the help it shows a whole row of format icons (for doing things like bold, italic etc.)?
  
• I don't have a second question - I just wanted to create a bulleted list!

Post written using now visible icons.

And now for some little tests:
Glow test.
Shadow test.
Marquee test.^{Sup test.}
Teletype test.

Ah, now that's more like it!!