I've looked at a couple of the forums mentioned here and taken a note of the text. The guitar one I looked at, Maestronet and Woodenboat are all UBBs forums. OK the colours etc may look different, they may have different features enabled/diabled but they are basically the same design.

Infopup, the makers of that forum also make another solution called Open Topic which can look similar but unlike UBBS which is based on a flat file and cgi is quite a powerhouse and uses Oracle (I think) as the database. If I remember correctly, Ebay uses an adaption of this system for their auction and certainly several large companies use it.

I think the forum (ASP-Dev.Com) I used for the Annexe was a UBBS clone written in ASP - even the Access database it uses is called UBB.mdb. It also used a very similar looking opening page and had the UBB codes. It still is pretty much as I got it except that rather than give the split to choose a forum, because of the comments of someone in the forum, I decided to give it a more "Mudcat" like page listing all the threads but at the same time opted to take advantage of the feautres that were already there.

Steve, I'm not sure which forum you went to and found forum splitting takes a long time to download. There are plenty of other factors far more likely to affect download times than forum splitting which at worst adds a little bit of processing overhead. Let's think of some: your connection to that site (could be very different to your connection speed you see on your computer), a lot of graphics or fancy stuff on the site to download, the acutal capacity of and load of that site, how well that site was performing at the time you visited it (as you are probably aware, sometimes sites need a kick up the ass)...

Another design I can think of is the ikonboard one which again follows similar lines to the UBB. Probably the clumsiest I have seen in recent times is the the BBC system.

Russ, the member only bit is an interesting one. Although I have opted to go member only for the Annexe, I very much like the open system in Mudcat and feel it was the best choice for its purpose. Some forums like the one I opted to use are member only by design. Other forum designs allow systems whereby the administrator can get priviliges for guests, members, even higher status members... It's rather like the choice of colors, etc in UBBS. I would not judge the forum itself on one admin's choice in selecting options provided by the package.

Jon