Understand and agree. We (as in the Lightning community) are working on it. We're still in the bleeding edge days of mostly CLI and manual control, but lots of progress is being made to make things easier.

If you're just accepting and issuing payments from the forum, you should only require a small number of private channels (~5, depending on the size of payments and how well-balanced the flows are) to gateway routing nodes. Routing nodes basically are the third-parties that "trustlessly proxy incoming LN payments" (and outgoing). Some more info about this can be found in this blog post: https://blog.lightning.engineering/posts/2018/05/30/routing.html.

There's really no reason for the forum to be doing routing, as each of the forum members should be creating channels to routing nodes as well (so that they can send and receive payments to and from anyone in the network), not just the forum node itself.

As far as DDoS protection, that's definitely not my area of expertise, but in the standard case, an LN node can filter traffic from IP addresses other than the ~5 routing nodes you have, and can also filter anything outside of a specific set of ports. Also, since you would be using private channels, the IP address of your node won't be visible to anyone other than your set of routing nodes, and you can also use Tor if you'd like to keep it private from them as well.