[timskii]

What you are probably looking for is Flickr-in-a-box as a separate application with a common user database. Just as I’m looking for a Facebook-in-a-box application to run alongside the forum to foster the more personal social side. I don’t believe these should be core parts of the forum software, but there is a need for them somehow.

This notion of modular is important, because it is easy to get side-tracked and try and build the entire internet into one application. That might ultimately happen (mirroring the history of the Microsoft platform model), but at this stage of the game, nobody has the resources to do everything, so doing one part of the jigsaw well is the best plan.

BBPress should focus development on its core, which still has weaknesses. IMHO the most urgent is augmentation of futuristic geek-only features with the traditional ones that most users understand. The need for these functions has been acknowledged in BBPress’s design, however the current implementation is lacking because they are too complex for “normal people”.

So RSS needs to be mirrored with bespoke email notifications, because the only people that “get” RSS are ‘bloggers. Gravatars need to be mirrored with uploadable avatars, because the only people that get Gravatars are ‘bloggers.

Ok, I generalise on the “bloggers” part. But I know moderately technical people that can’t manage to set up a Gravatar, and have no idea what to do with an RSS feed. So the clueless masses stand no chance of using these features for the purpose they were designed.

BBPress’s killer feature at the moment is spam control without forcing users to jump through hoops just to register and post. Easy to work with code, and general lack of bloat are good to. But take a look at this, and tell me the #1 feature requirement of forum software (and if anyone can point to why that’s affecting phpBB 2 sites more than other software, I’m curious). That’s literally hundreds of spam posts an hour. Most admins faced with that kind of nightmare won’t be too worried about forcing users to host files elsewhere.