Discussion Board Pro allows you to create sub-forums within your site. Your users can choose which board to allocate their topics to, allowing you to keep your forum nicely organized and helping your users find the topics they’re most interested in.
You can specify different access permissions by role for each board. So one board could be open to anyone to post on, and another board could only be available to users with a certain role, e.g. subscriber, customer, to post on. One board could be viewable by anyone, another board could only be viewed by admins. And so on.
Boards can also be hierarchical, meaning that you can create child boards under main boards, effectively giving you sub-sub-forums.
Users can choose to subscribe (follow) specific boards in order to receive email notifications of any new topic or reply posted on that specific board.
In Discussion Board Pro, users can subscribe to (follow) any topic they wish. They’ll receive an email notification whenever another user leaves a reply on the followed topic.
Users can choose to un-follow a topic at any time.
The admin approvals feature allows you to decide who can join your discussion board. When a new user registers for your site, you’ll receive an email with the user’s details and a link to approve the registration. If you decide not to approve the user, they won’t be able to post.
View an example profile page.
Discussion Board Pro gives you the option to enable a WYSIWYG editor on the front-end.
Discussion Board Pro allows you to enable image uploads for new topics.
You can define categories and tags for topics. Users can allocate their new topics to pre-existing categories and/or tags or you can choose to allow them to define their own.
Discussion Board Pro is happy working with any WordPress theme. It has neutral styling and you can easily use custom CSS if you wish.
For more background information about WordPress forum plugins, you can take a look at this article which examines the nature of forums and their primary uses, and includes a round up of alternative plugins.