So one of the film instructors at my school runs an online portion to his classes. But he uses Yahoo groups and it makes me want to kill myself. Theres lots of problems, such as if you don't sign up to get all of the e-mails to get sent to you, then you don't get any of the attachments, so you end up getting your inbox flooded with the inane posts of most of the class.

He also does this for his private acting classes. I am wanting to show him some examples of how he could upgrade to grown up internet (the classes really need more than yahoo groups in many ways) but I'm actually not quite sure what the best method would be.

I have considered WordPress with forum extensions, as well as something like phpbb (because it's free) that has started to implement more CMS type features into it's forum software.

The key things are that there needs to be a separate forum for each class cycle. Students post journals and people reply to them, and at the end of the class, it doesn't get used anymore, so a smooth archival method and support for lots of forums (or whatever) is important.

Additionally, his private classes need to be hidden unless someone is in the class, and I don't know if the WordPress forum extensions provide this. There also has to be a very very shallow learning curve for the administrator because he is a luddite.

Going to start experimenting on my webspace, but I'd appreciate input especially from people who have run communities.