Hullo:) Ive been studying the website lots of times Thought i would say how good this site is!

This looks cool so far, what's up people?
If there's anyone else here, let me know.
Oh, and yes I'm a real person LOL.

Bye,

With Advanced forum, It's all about the theming, so yes, you can put the author pane wherever you like.

The only reason I used phpBB on TeenRC was because they had been using it for the last two years and were quite happy with it. It worked out quite well with the Drupal 6 integration however it does add complexity in terms of both user and node syncing. For example, I still haven't figured out how to get username changes syncing both ways. If someone changes their username in Drupal, it sends the phpBB stuff out of whack. Once, after using Actions and Triggers to automate some login stuff, the phpBB syncing stopped working entirely and it took me days to figure it out. There's also the added complexity of having to learn two systems and administer the cms and the forum via two separate interfaces. And all the stuff you would do easily with CCK and Views (like have recent post blocks, comment counts, related, etc.) aren't easily done when dealing with phpBB posts. That might not matter in your application, however it did on TeenRC. I needed to create custom stats pages. It was easy to do with Views for the Drupal nodes, but not so easy with phpBB posts.

So though the quicker route to a "proper" forum would be phpBB, if you want to do anything custom I'd go with Advanced Forum. It will take more work up front but in the end you will have unified integrated system working exactly how you design it to work.

Maybe.