Quotethere is a few free php sites out there that can be found for a testing board.I'm just posting this because the way things are going some members might want to give up on their Yabb SE board that they really want.
I'd be surprised if there's a staff member who doesn't have a test server running at home, so facilities for test boards really aren't the issue. But, looking at it another way, we all do this for the love of it and none of us have unlimited free time. A standard YaBB SE board is still a very powerful piece of software which I'd recommend new users to try unmodded at first because mods can interact with the board or each other in many different ways and the choice to install them or not is ultimately yours rather than ours...