Esteemed Monks,

In the next few days I have to put up a forum software on my web server to serve as a discussion board for students enrollened for a specific lecture. I'm naturally looking for something perl based, but my three most important requirements are security, fast install and security. With fast install I mean that I don't need a full fledged CMS, and that there is already some standard (css) skin included and I don't need to invest time into web page design to get it up and running.

In a similar question in 2002 perlmonks were suggesting IkonBoard http://www.ikonboard.com as a good forum software but in the same year the original creators left the project to create a new forum software in php. ikonboard still exists, with new maintainers, but is it still good?

Another alternative seems to be Parley, based on Catalyst, but is it ready for deployment, and is it written with security in mind ?

And there is the Everything engine, for which I have confidence securitywise but it seems to be more a complete CMS and not a simple forum software

Others out there, like E-Blah http://www.eblah.com/, mwForum http://www.mwforum.org/, ikonForums http://www.ikonforums.com might also be worth a look, has anyone information on them? Is there anything else I didn't find? YaBB is out of the question, past experiences of perlmonks disqualify it.

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: I finally used mwForum. The code looks clean, well structured and easy to read, the maintainer is helpful and answers fast. On the other hand it doesn't use taint-mode, uses no CGI or template module and I found a very minor non-critical bug (testing for empty string with "if ($string)") almost immediately when I wanted to change some code.

In reply to Forum/Bulletin Board software by jethro

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