What's the most widely-used PHP/MySQL based forum software for medium size websites?

Question

I want to power up an online forum which has the following feature. These features are observed in almost every popular forums ranging from small to mag size. These features are:

1)A front page which contains links of hot topics, click on any of which will bring the visitors to that article which is eventually located in one the groups in forum.
2)A full-fledged forum operating behind the front page.
3)A mechanism to navigate through different subgroups of the forum
4)Sticky function to highlight hot topics
5)Personal messages.
6)Advertisements
7)Moderator

I found almost every popular forums has these feature. However, after I review all the CMS systems at http://www.opensourcecms.com/ , I was surprised that I cannot find any of these software can provide feature 1) which is mentioned above.

Please let me know what the hell the software are running on those popular forums. eg. http://bbs.shanghai.sh.cn/

Please let me know the best Open source CMS that suits my need.

Answer 1

I personally use
http://www.vbulletin.com

And you can find CMS front ends for this forum all over, one being http://www.phpportals.com