I don't have much experience with jforum. I had installed version 2.3.5 and recently updated to 2.4.1.

This is what I did:
1) Backup the complete /jforum directory
2) Drop jforum.war to tomcat's webapps directory (completely overwrites the application)
3) Restore jforum-custom.conf file
4) Restore database/mysql/mysql.properties file
5) Restore jforum/upload directory
6) Execute the sql clauses from upgrade/2.4.0 and upgrade/2.4.1

That was it. Is this a typical update process for a simple install? It seems a bit cumbersome and error-prone.

Hi, since you are upgrading from v2.3.5 to v2.4.1, you'll need to run both the 2.3.5 to 2.4.0 SQL script and 2.4.0 to 2.4.1 SQL script.

And you'll need to copy back the images/avatar too.

For my way, I used to do the following steps:
1. unpack the jforum-2.4.1.war into a directory on the server, say /tmp/jforum-2.4.1
2. delete all the jar file in the old jforum's WEB-INF/lib
3. copy all the files from /tmp/jforum-2.4.1/ to overwrite the old jforum's directory
4. delete the old versoin jQuery javascript
5. edit the modulesMapping.properties, remove the last line of install
6. run the upgrade SQL script from all the version between 2.3.5 to 2.4.1, first 2.3.5 to 2.4.0, then 2.4.0 to 2.4.1
7. customize the template files
8. change file or directory permission if needed