The WWWBoard program has three advantages (and of course many disadvantages).

First

The Web page display is simple. And people like that. You can look at the main Web page and go down hundreds of posts just by pressing the Page Down key for example. This makes it very easy to look at multiple threads. All of those technical features available with your new forum tend to get people confused. I could have organized any number of boards like that on my own Web sites long ago. But I like the WWWBoard display format a lot more.

Second

The Perl computer code can be easily modified to produce any result desired. And there is probably some code that can be used with the program to let it store picture in connection with a post. Since you don’t do Perl programming you would not be aware of how easy it is to modify the code. Plus, if an effort were made to develop advanced versions of the WWWBoard program it might be possible to get some volunteers from the Perl Newsgroup to help with the effort.

Third

Your new program might also work with this though things start getting complicated fairly quickly.

The Xampp program can be used with WWWBoard to let you run the board on your PC as if it were being run on an Internet server. That makes it possible to very rapidly develop and test new Perl code without having to constantly copy the code to the Internet server and make corrections.

Multiple parties could then develop and test the board features code on their own PCs.

I myself will go with whatever board gets settled on. But I will say once again that the present board has a Web page structure that is quite attractive to many people because of its simplicity. And if the new forum does not get a lot of interest then you might want to reconsider developing more advanced versions of the WWWBoard.