I run a few SMF forums myself and the old SMF version used on here was quite a long way out of date, I think it was v1.11 when the latest is v1.14 and there have been quite few security upgrades between the two.
v2.0 that's now being used on here has been in Beta testing for a year or so and is the latest version of the SMF forums, released in June 2011. There are also a lot more add-ons for this version than the previous one, for stopping spammers and alike.
Things like text colour can be changed in the forum CSS files so it shouldn't be too hard to make them more readable. Although it can be time consuming if you're not familiar with CSS or how the forum code has been constructed. ;)
