Let me give a little background and explanation of what Drupal is - and why i think its a great choice for us, im not going to assume any in depth geekery knowledge so excuse me if this is all old news to you.

Drupal is a free open source content management system, or CMS. Sounds shit so far, but geeks love to dress cool stuff up in dull language, then shorten the whole thing to 3 letter acronyms. Put simply a CMS allows you to easily add and edit elements of a website. Not using a CMS and doing all the pages by hand is the equivalent of turning up at party with a box of transitors and some copper wire, and building your amps and speaker cones from scratch.... sure its possible - and may even be fun - but it takes for ever, and all it takes is one munter sneezing in the wrong direction and the whole things fucked.

Drupal takes the pain away by giving web based administration pages, where people can, for example, write a story, upload some images, or whatever. Its fairly resistant to sneezing munters as its open source - essentially the geek equivalent of the free party movement. Much like free party's OS is made by groups of people just because they like making stuff, and once its made anyone can get involved and improve it or even make it do things it was never meant to do (think uk garage on bedlams rig :) )

Drupals also built in a modular way - and due to its open nature you can find many modules to plug in that do *most* of what you might want. And if you cant find one - its *relatively* simple to write your own. For example straight away in drupal you have a module which allows people to leave comments to any article or story that's written - a module you can download and plug in allows pages to be written in different languages - a module i would like to write is a myspace like audio player.

Chaz - the spam issue - drupal can be set up with different user roles.

At a basic level you have an unknown user - just someone who comes to the site - these people can be set up to only view stuff, but not add comments , or talk in the forums.

The next level of user would be registered, yep they have to sign up. At this level, they could post comments and forum topics.

Above that would be n23users - here they can create story's, articles upload images, music what ever - its at this level i see it working like a myspace thing.

Above that are site admins who can delete stuff, and promote users.

Its a bit of a hierarchy - but i would suggest to make the n23users as open as possible - an admin can always remove them if they made a mess...

The only bit im not too sure about is forums - there's certainly a forum module (Ive activated it the example below) but its pants compared with things like phpbb - but - it would be possible to hack a phpbbb install so that people could use on log-in for the forum and the site (which is pretty important i think)

anyway there's a simple test system set up here give it a go. At the moment its just a simple skeleton site - , but you can enter some stories - have a look at the administer menu - don't worry about breaking stuff it doesn't matter.