A decent forum experience for Drupal... using the Drupal forum!

Hi there. I'm new to Drupal but I'm getting to it quickly. I have explored a lot of modules and functionalities of this great CMS. I need good forums for my site, and the most powerful feature of Drupal is the "node concept", so I will use the default Drupal forum for my needs. But sadly, it lacks some key functionalities for a decent forum.

So, I think it may be useful to make a list of desired functions for Drupal 5.0 forum and how to get them realized.

This is my list. Some of the features have workarounds, some other not:

1- Private messaging: essential feature, but privatemsg module is not ported to 5.x yet; its development seems stopped.

2- Allow publishing external images in nodes and comments: there are several approachs, but none of them really perfect. The very best approach would be a little WYSIWYG editor with limited functions (bold and italic text, paragraph alignment, insertion of images, embedded videos and URLs). TinyMCE for 5.x is too huge for this. Also, the external images would need to be scaled down when exceeding a predefined size, and there is no module or snippet to achieve this, as far as I know.

3- (Close related to 2) Embedded Youtube & Google videos: you can allow the "embed" HTML tag, but this is a very non-user friendly approach. The final user needs to embed those videos just using an URL (a pair of buttons on that WYSIWYG editor!).

4- Allow thumbnailing when attaching images to nodes -> upload previews do this, but surpringsingly, it only works when uploading/editing the images (the thumbnails are not seen in the node view page).

5- Allow file uploads for comments, also with image thumbnailing -> comment upload is available for 5.x (issues section), but does not thumbnail attached images.

Best approach for 4 and 5: make upload previews module to show thumbnails in both nodes and comments, I think.

6- Dynamic signatures not revealed in searches: the default signature concept of Drupal is not good. Signatures appear as part of the comment text, so they appear also in searches. Also, when a user changes his signature, previously published comments keep the old signature. Signature solves this (apart from the search issue, I think), but it has not been even released as a module.

7- Threaded forums, post count and registration date visible in user postings: flatforum do this, but at least for me, it failed when I tried to install it with Drupal 5 and garland theme.

And another one, not strictly related to forums but to profiles: Allow multiple selections at profile fields. For example, in a Mac community, users might be able to choose "macbook" and "mac pro" as their computers. Actually, you can choose only 1 item at the same field. Node profile seems to be the solution, but it's not ported to 5.x yet.

With all this issues covered (some others are already solved: moving comments, subscriptions, etc), Drupal forum would be a very serious competitor for phpBB-like forums. Actually, they are not.

Now, your lists!