I can see why you'd want to compete with phpbb and why it can't be too hard: phpbb plainly sucks. But please-oh-please don't follow the idiotic project naming of the php community by prefixing everything with 'php', or 'perl' in this case.

One thing I find curious though, is that Perl seems to be your "obsession" and you want to compete with phpbb (which is hyped to extremes), yet it'll be "nothing serious, just a fun little project that would put perl on the map with message boards". I don't see how that'd work out. As for programmers, look at http://sourceforge.net or the likes.

Couple of suggestions for your message board:

• Give the user the option to view the threads in ermm a threaded way (kinda like Perlmonks). Makes reading easier, IMHO.
• Don't bother creating a "memberlist" that any bot can harvest anyone can see.

Besides that, go work! ;)