In my view phpBB is an awful piece of bloatware. It's terribly inefficient and doesn't integrate well with other software (i.e. it only ever really works as a standalone forum, you can't actually use it to run an entire website). The same is true of most of the forum packages. I like Vanilla a lot, but it doesn't really do what we wanted to achieve here.

There's a 'track' button on everyone's profile page that shows when threads you've started or contributed to have been updated. And if you're absolutely determined to not miss a thing, ever, the RSS feeds are a much more efficient way of keeping up than anything we could do on the website.

Having said that, making things easier to follow online is on my ever-growing to-do list, but comparing what we do here to phpBB or vBulletin or UBB or whatever is not comparing apples with apples. While blogs and forums basically do the same thing (display content), beyond that there are vast differences in in terms of formatting, in terms of integration capabilities, in terms of SEO, and in terms of what we thought would work with Word readers, and work for us.