MadFish wrote:
... Many people either don't know how to use forums, can't be bothered opening a page to see what's happening (this is really big problem), or just find the learning curve intimidating.

I have a problem with the last two since my target group is not very computer literate. I wrote a 'users guide' to help raise awareness of the forums, notifications and other things. If you find it useful feel free to rip bits out of it to suit your own purposes.....

I have also found a conversion tool to transfer yahoo to PHPBB forums The tool is at http://www.tt-solutions.com/en/products/yahoo2mbox/