If you look at your forum now, it really doesn't look all that impressive. If you have users who are used to your phpBB forum, they are going to start emailing you nasty messages about how they hate the new look and all that. Let's try to make things a bit easier for us all.
First up, let's install the following modules:
Upon installation of the Flat Comments module, you will be able to flatten existing comments for any and all types. I prefer flat comments, but suit yourself. I do think forums look better with flat comments as it is easier to find the most recent post.
Go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Advanced Forum. I don't like the 'naked' forum style, so change it to something else (blue_lagoon_stacked is nice.) The rest can be left alone unless you really want to change it.
Now if you look at your imported forum, it is starting to look like a forum! You may notice that the user avatars and smilies are not showing and the signatures aren't quite right. We'll get to that, but first let's tackle...
It is pretty common for a forum to be accessible only to moderators or those with sufficiently high enough status. Drupal currently doesn't support this behavior natively, but is expected to in D7. In the meantime, we need the following modules installed:
You will need to rebuild the content permissions. Now to set a forum for a special group of members, go to Administer -> Content Management -> Forums. Select 'edit forum' next to the forum you wish to make private and select the appropriate permissions at the bottom. For example, make the moderator the only one who can view a forum. You might want to adjust the other permissions as well so that the appropriate individuals may edit or delete posts.
In order to convert ASCII emoticons to graphical smilies, you need to install the Smileys module. You may import smilies from other applications, such as phpBB or Yahoo! In order to have them work with your Forum input format, go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Input Formats and configure the forum format by enabling the Smileys filter. Also, go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Smileys and under Settings, enable smileys for nodes and comments and all desired format types (at least your forum type.) You might want to go ahead and enable this for other formats as well. If you look at your forum posts, you should have smilies working!
By default, Drupal appends the signature to the end of the post. In order handle this properly (meaning, like other forums), install the Signatures for Forums module. Go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Signatures for Forums and adjust the settings (show the signatures for the desired format types, I use the forum input format...) Next, Drupal's signature functionality must be turned on, so go to Administer -> User Management -> User Settings and make sure signature support is enabled (we did this earlier.) Since we are also using Advanced Forum, go to Administer -> Site Configuration -> Signatures for Forums and expand 'Other Options' and disable 'Automatically add signatures to content.'
Users created in Drupal should have no problem with their avatars showing up. However, I was going crazy trying to get the avatars for users imported from phpBB to show up. After some digging through the databases and looking at the files in the phpBB images/avatar/upload directory, I figured it out. Say you have a file in the directory named 63f0ff6ffa05cdd65149165723a8afd8_10.jpg. The 63f0ff6ffa05cdd65149165723a8afd8_ is some sort of hash used by phpBB for reasons I can't understand. If you dig into the database, you will find that the user with the avatar has the filename as simply 10.jpg in the database. I used Bulk Rename Utility to remove everything up to and including the underscore in the files. This worked for the majority of the avatars, but there were some still not showing. More digging in the database showed that after this initial rename process, I had some files with names like 4_234576465234.jpeg in the database which should be associated with a file named 4.jpeg. You can find these files by searching the drupal_users table for where the picture value is "like" '%\_%' (notice the escaped underscore and wildcards). Since there were only a few, I manually editted the database to remove the underscore and gibberish after. I have no idea why phpBB did this, but it did. However, we still aren't finished, as the forum still won't show the avatars! Again, looking at the path for the avatar, we can see that phpBB2Drupal has them in the database as being in the directory 'files/' when they should be in 'sites/default/files/'. Use the following SQL command on the users table (in my case, drupal_users) by going to that table in phpMyAdmin and clicking the SQL tab.
UPDATE drupal_users SET picture = REPLACE(picture, "files/", "sites/default/files/")followed by
UPDATE drupal_users SET picture = REPLACE(picture, "sites/default/sites/default/", "sites/default/")
in order to remove any duplications.
(see this issue for how I figured this one out: http://drupal.org/node/689852).
At this point, you should be able to see the avatars in the forum!!!!
(By the way, the avatars from phpBB need to be copied to 'sites/default/files/pictures/'. I then used IrfanView to resize them to the size used by the site/forum.) In order to get the pictures to show at an appropriate size without physically resizing them (in other words, to have smaller pictures in the forum posts and larger pictures in the profile), use the ImageCache Profiles module. Details can be found in the 'Miscellaneous Additions' part of this tutorial.