Drupal: Best Forum Module

Drupal 7 and the advanced forum module, helper modules available for the advanced forum module, along with ACL module for access control, is the best way to create a forum within a Drupal website. You will also want to use the "crumbs module" to customize the breadcrumbs when using advanced forum. The forum URLs can all be configured with pathauto patterns, which is really helpful too.

The advanced forum module is designed so that it has its own .CSS support, but it also picks up some .css layout queues from site's main theme.

Also, be prepared to need to insert some .CSS adjustments for the column widths and column heading text colors.

Beyond the above, the advanced forum module includes most of the features one would expect from standalone forum systems, but with the benefit that the forum is tightly integrated with drupal. All the topics and replies are Drupal nodes and the forum container hierarchy is built with taxonomy.

We routinely deliver forums just with a new content type, a taxonomy vocabulary, display suite and a few views. We've stopped using the built in forum module because it's not flexible enough, it has views-like outputs which aren't alterable or friendly to front-end development.