During my lunch hour yesterday, and a few hours last night, I managed to get a forum solution up and running on my PluggedOut webspace.
To see it in action, visit http://www.pluggedout.com/penpals/forums. It should be fairly simple to work out - it doesn’t do anything earth shatteringly clever (yet)
I’ll probably make the entire “community website” solution that Penpals effectively “is” available as free and open source on my website in the coming weeks… as soon as it’s finished enough to do anything with.