I installed Vanilla the other day to try it out. I’m not excited about documentation that includes chmod 777. I did that only long enough to finish the install and then tightened it up as soon as it was done.
The installation itself was simple enough. Fill out a few forms and you are up and running.
One of the problems with forum software is that you never know how it is really going to perform until well after you have a community of users pumping topics and comments into it. Of course by then it is a lot more work with switch if you run into problems. Is there a standard for export/import of forums? At least with blogs you have RSS/ATOM has a lowest common denominator for export/import.