What you said made a lot of sense and I got it working! Thank you very much for your help and guidance!

Unfortunately, I am running into another issue. When users try to register they are greeted with this message after clicking submit when registering.

"The account has been registered but the activation key could not been sent (mail server not available). Please contact the forum administrator and ask for manual account activation."

I may have missed the setup for this. How would I go about getting this to work?

EDIT: I am self hosting this forum on my Server so maybe I won't be able to do the mail setup portion. Will I just have to register users manually?