Well, hope you like the new forums.

The new 'skin' also blends with the look of the new Winstep web site, but it's still work-in-progress as there are a handful of things in the base theme that I'm not very happy about.

Still new to PHPBB3 too, so in the next couple of days I'll be exploring the extra available functionality - it would be really nice if I could un-ban the whole Gmail domain thanks to it (but I doubt it).

Looks good
Blends with the new overall website, and is nice and clean
Only suggestion I would make on the style is to merge the icons from ID_Launch into the winstep black, and make that your default style.

Use phpBB3 a lot myself on 2 other sites.
to be honest, to keep the spammers away I ended up moving to admin justification, promoted 2 guys from the site as user admins, and that meant we could keep an eye on things and activations weren't slow.
Critical to it though was the addition of the "Activation Justification" mod http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1258765 which allowed us to weed out stupid entries from bots like "test", and the creation of a custom field which was mandatory on registration. Seems like many bots fail when there were 2 additional fields to fill in..

Another 2 mods to consider would be the "Topic Solved" http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1214795 and "Thanks for Post" http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1690905

Lots more features in 3.x to get to grips with, and many can help to reduce the needs on you - so enjoy learning

Can I suggest changing the link when clicking on the Winstep logo at the top of the forums from http://forums.winstep.net/phpBB2/index.php to http://winstep.net/

Otherwise there is no link to get back to the main website (and the existing logo link is fairly redundant - because the "board index" link is right underneath it), and clicking on the main logo intuitively should go back to the main page.

edit: forgot to mention - also clicking on the same logo on the main website goes to http://winstep.net/ - so for consistency sake...

You're right, but hold your horses as what you are seeing is just a temporary skin.

The final forum skin is being worked on and will be very different (and yes, in it the Winstep logo at the top links to the Winstep web site - in fact, the whole Winstep.net navigation bar is there, so it will be like you never even left it).