Re: Forums as Comment engine?
This is certainly possible with some custom code, though the real question remains as to why you want it. Given the WordPress comment systems have a far greater “forum-ness” about them these days (pagination, avatars, html/bbcode, wyswig threading etc etc). What would be the advantage to your users of having the same content in two different places on your website?
In fact, wouldn’t it be easier to just theme your wordpress to make your comments bigger and loko more forum like (maybe even removing the actual article on page 2 of the comments?)?
On one of my wordpress installs, the blog-post only appears on the initial page and with no comments, and all the comments are handled under “www.website.com/blog-post/comments” so they have their own pages with more space etc. It works really well for that site in a place where I couldn’t have used bbPress due to it’s complete lack of moderation.