Just some quick thoughts:

As for the free perl-based board YaBB seems to be feature filled and about what you are looking for. But you may spend as much time integrating things like users and sessions as you would using a framework.

As to the from scratch option, I wouldn't do it all the way from scratch. Catalyst should be a good starting point as a framework and if your existing code isn't bad it should be fairly easy to integrate the two (especially if you were good and used a templating system like Template Toolkit (or others) to build your original site).

If that doesn't seem like a good fit, then start with CGI::Application and Template Toolkit. This will give you more flexibility than Catalyst but it'll take longer.

A previous discussion: perl bulletin board

grep
Just me, the boy, two monks, and no questions asked

In reply to Re: OT: Need opinion on building a forum by grep
in thread OT: Need opinion on building a forum by Anonymous Monk

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