I've lost my post content because I've accidentally hit F5 while typing my post so I've lost about 15 minutes of typing here. I would ask to quit trolling about Invisionfree. I don't know about other forum hostings but from experience IF is not that bad. I find it funny that people see IF and other software only for their flaws and doesn't even bother taking time to check the advantages.
First of all, i find funny that you complain about invisionfree ads being sheisty while cemetech also have ads as well at bottom of page. They aren't that annoying, they even match the page colors as well, so they aren't disturbing at all. It's not like the pop ups and banners some free hosting put in your pages.
Second of all, at least on Invisionfree you have good support, and they even have a support forum, where you can ask support directly, and if staff is gone atm, even the users can help you. At least they won't accuse you of stuff you didn't do like Kv83 PAID hosting provider did to him about MaxCoderz: they charged him bandwidth he didnt even use, and when he emailed them it took a while to get a reply, and they could barely even help at all. If your board get deleted (which is impossible unless you use "zelda" as your password and give admin access to everyone) you can get it restored because they do nightly backups of everything. yes it take a while for that last one, but it's because there is 5000 n00bs per day who send them support ticket saying "ZOMG MY FOURMZ GOT HAXED!1!eleven" as they used a bad password, and atm they are working on Zetaboards so that take most of their time. Normally you get an entire forum restored in two week if it get deleted, with other hostings you have no guarantee if your board is gonna even stay more than a month online at all (MaxCoderz forums get deleted at least once per month, everytime i go here the kvince83.tengun.net directory is missing), plus I've heard about lot of people experience about cheap/free hosting about their board getting deleted due to server problems and never got restored.
third, Invisionfree isn't even gonna use that stripped down IPB 1.3 at all anymore in a few months, as they are switching to this:
http://beta.zetaboards.com/test/ (this is a beta, they have some features disabled because they are still in the debugging purpose, and most finished features are in the Admin CP). And even in its current state it's not even that bad. You can't use php in the code, but you can use php scripts ran from img tags. At least it's secure too, unlike phpbb who is filled with security flaws and if you forget to update you can get cracked, like it happened often with maxcoderz and once with detached solutions.
Fourth, Omnimaga didn't got any spambot ads in two month at the time i am writing this, and i have no anti-spambot mod at all installed. I do what is needed to prevent them from posting as much as possible and it works. Now I delete like two bot per week, which doesn't even try posting. MaxCoderz use phpbb and today they got hit by at least 10-20 spambot posts. And you don't judge a forum software/hosting by it's spambot population anyway. Those bot post everywhere they can, if they can post at all.
Fifth: Hosting is reliable considering what some other hosting offer: only 16 MB for user file upload, but thats a free forum hosting anyway, not a file hosting/site hosting. UNLIMITED bandwidth, forum can be any size, so if you are lucky and your board grow to insane proportions even if you reach 1 billion posts invisionfree is not gonna charge you anything at all, even if you get 700000 visits per day. There is some downtimes, and they ALSO got server crashes, but this happened only 3 times in 5 years. and the second time they managed to get all posts/members restored, only files attachements from forum members in their posts were missing, and in return invisionfree increased the file diskspace limit to 32 MB on this server. Invisionfree servers doesnt have 100% uptime, but other hosting doesn't have 100% uptime either, and free ones or cheap ones are slow as hell as well in most case (if anyone remember cemetech back in middle 2005)
Anyway, calc84maniac is free to use whatever he wants. If he feels like venturing into phpbb installation (which is not too hard if you have nice hosting), go ahead, but I hope you backup very often, because sometimes those hosting aren't always reliable. They can decide to shut down free hosting at any moment and only provide paid hosting without warning. If you don't feel ready i would suggest you start an Invisionfree board, and me, tifreak8x and rivereye will be willing to help when we come here. I've had issues with invisionfree sometimes, but if it really sucked I would have moved to something else a long while ago. Now I have been using them for almost 2 years, and my TI forum is approaching 40000 posts quickly, and it's still here, it never went down for more than 12 hours hosting wise and people seems to be fine with it.
You are free to disagree with this post, but please provide valid arguments this time, so this won't be considered as trolling of any sort
$60.00 per year 
you host yourself and you can do anything you want to prevent spam registrations without shutting down registrations, and without going along with the maass solution all the spammers are concentrating on