Links 2 is a program to allow you to run a hierarchical links directory, and phpBB is a threaded forum/bulletin board script, so one cannot replace the other.

And the reason people try to make Perl programs run on Windoze platforms is that Perl is better suited to certain tasks than the alternatives and the Perl dev team don't keep changing its standard behaviour when they bring out a new release of the language (unlike the PHP developers).