I created a forum with Flatboard, linked here: https://hypertextzone.net/forum

I also posted a summary of my experience setting it up on my main site: https://hypertextzone.net/blog/ivans1/flatboard

It's a great project. It's got all of the necessary features and is also flat-file. I wish it were easier to theme (rather than using a dozen PHP files, use six or so Twig or Blade files), that the community was bigger, that the documentation was a bit more extensive, and that the CAPTCHAs were a bit more secure. Thanks to Fred for creating this, though.

Your website is really beautiful, I am impressed :D Good job ;)
how did you discover Flatboard?

I found Flatboard when I was looking for flat-file forum software to add to my website. This website eventually came up in the search results after trying a few different searches. I saw that it had most of the basic features I wanted, so I installed it.

Thank you for choosing Flatboard.
I read your article on Flatboard, and you're absolutely right about the party theme.
Know that I correct this on version 2 which will arrive very soon (this month normally), so will be more oriented MVC with a dedicated theme of administration.
All this without touching the data, so the transition will be easy.

Can you tell me how the bots bypass the CAPTCHA? Do you have a recommendation to improve or replace it?

Well, the CAPTCHA is basically just an image of text, so it can be broken with an Optical Character Recognition engine like Tesseract or Gocr. Modern OCR software is good enough that it's generally considered insecure to use a CAPTCHA based on distorting text : https://elie.net/publication/the-end-is-nigh-generic-solving-of-text-based-captchas/

Good CAPTCHAs will use distorted image recognition or voice recognition, though those are hard to implement. Google's reCAPTCHA could be enabled as an alternative to the current system, though it would not be wise to enable it by default.

I'd recommend adding a few things to the current system. Perhaps distort the text a bit, add artifacts and noise. That won't stop all bots, though, so I'd recommend adding reCAPTCHA optionally.

It would be very easy to add recaptcha to Flatboard, just modify HTMLForm::submit() and HTMLForm::checkBot(). And it's more fun for visitors

  I do not like to use the Google tools, so I changed the captcha lib to make it more complex.
Having to make a plugin if not, Simon appears to have made good progress on the thing 😀

Glad this has made some progress!