There are advantages and disadvantages. - Wight Slayer

It may be harder to read all the posts from the week you were gone, but it's much easier to figure out which ones you don't care to read. And much easier to skip them once you've decided (with phpbb you'd still have to scroll past the entire text of the message to get to later in the thread).

The ability to make no-text (nt) posts is useful, and there's no extra bullshit like account creation, cool points, multiple forums, on and on.

For a really high volume forum you need the phpbb style, but this one shouldn't see all that much traffic.

-Wighty