Okay, I honestly didn't mean to take over stakeholders with a features 
discussion.  In a week or so, I'll have the Gamehawk forum over on 
Wirebird divvied up into gearhead discussion (which it almost-entirely is 
right now) and other sections for ordinary mortals on bug reporting (we'll 
need a lot of this) and wishlisting.

However, I wanted to mention something I've just discovered in Vanilla 
that would be shockingly easy to implement in Gamehawk:  whispering. 
Vanilla has, as I mentioned, a prejudice against the private-messaging 
taking away from the forums, which is fair.  But they've added whispering, 
which is inlining private messages.  This strikes me as *really* useful 
for roleplaying, and solves a problem I've been having about what to do 
about replying directly to a poster (because email addresses will now 
appear as "member+KarenCravens@phoenyx.net"... so if someone *sent* mail 
to that, did I want to risk using the Phoenyx as a "relay"?)  Simple, I'll 
just put it in the forum... as a whisper.  That's almost worth 
implementing right away.

The other big feature that will be somewhat down the road is scorefiling. 
Want to read your own threads first, or ones in which you've replied? 
Have a rule that assigns those a higher score.  Really tired of people on 
the Fudge list bringing up linked skills and attributes?  Score down any 
message with "link" or "linked" in it (well, okay, you might have to get 
fancier).  If something scores below your cutoff, it'll get ignored 
altogether (pre-marked as read, most likely).

If it doesn't turn out to be outrageously processor-expensive, it'd be 
really cool to have the system set to "send me email notifications only 
for scores higher than X."  No promises.  (Yeah, we'll have email 
notifications, even if we can't apply scorefiles for 'em.  Why people 
would want to have email notifications when they could just have the 
*message* emailed to them and save having to click, I'll never know.)

-- 
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net