[grassrootspa]

_ck_, I love you, (and you are without a doubt the absolute best when it comes to plugins) but I for one am very excited to have the ability to use gravatars and voice built into the core bbPress program.

Respectfully to all, just because the ABILITY to use a new feature is built into bbPress DOES NOT force one to use it. It’s still totally up YOU. No one HAS to incorporate Gravatars or Voices into their site, but it is very cool for newbies to simply turn a core feature on or off rather than needing to download a plugin that is probably months or even a year old…praying it will work with the latest version.

Am I saying Sam should build an NES Emulator and a Weatherbug Widget into bbPress 1.2? HECK NO.

(Sam, start with the Atari emulator instead)

But things like Gravatars, (which Automattic owns) have tremendous potential use (goodbye individual avatar uploading for every single forum, hello universality). And the ABILITY to display voices makes sense to add in (being able to show the number of different people contributing to a topic certainly enhances bbPress).

Perhaps I am in the minority here, but I am hoping future versions of bbPress will continue to add these sorts of new features that make the bbPress experience more enjoyable for all users.