I understand that would be an issue, however it will not be for commercial use, its only a project for my coursework, so I might get away with not having a secure forum.
In that case, you could allow unregistered users to post. The bad part is that there will then be a disconnect between your message board and the rest of your website.
If I use the logins provided with the forum, I may not get enough marks as they might say this is not my own work.
If you are creating user accounts manually, then you could disable registration on the message board, then stipulate that when a user account is created or modified, the changes are to be manually reflected through the message board administration panel.
A more administrator friendly system would automate this, but you would have to figure out how the message board user account creation and update works, and duplicate that in your user account management.
however if I do use the logins provided with forum...can I use them to work with other parts of my website? as i want my users to be able to upload photos to the website...
Yes, but you will need to figure out how their user authentication system works.
