HL I too have been a long time user of phpBB, and I agree with orca being suitable for light use - on my site it slots in quite nicely - this is because on my site the main focus is the blogs, photos & video sections; the forum is simply a bonus, and in reality little used. But on a site where the focus is more on the forum, this is obviously a different issue, especially when you consider that it would be in direct competition with other forum based sites in the same niche - sites using phpBB see more / IPB / etc.

The things I like most about orca is that it is a native module, and it is visually DIFFERENT to other forums - it's a lot cleaner looking. In the web, sometimes it's being different that gives you the edge, otherwise it's simply ANOTHER phpBB / IPB / whatever integration with a different colour skin. These other forums are so well known, they are instantly recognisable by their layout, and in my opinion look like they added on as an afterthought, rather than looking like they are supposed to be there.

Re not improving orca in D7 being laziness - If you look at the codebase for orca and compare it against D6 - orca is actually a LOT more advanced - IMHO D7 has now been brought up to speed with orca. The main changes to orca for D7 were simply to improve the integration - there's only one instance now - instead of two - one for groups and one for the normal forum. I think orca was not touched in D7 simply because it was already at the level it was required to be at and there was more work to do on the rest of the site. IMHO D7 was really a codebase update - not really a feature update, D7 does not really do too much more than D6 did, it just does it differently.

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