why can't drupal forums be more like phpbb and vbulletin?

After looking at all the different possibilities for integrating phpbb with drupal, I gave up because none of them were as tight as I wanted (for good reason -- phpbb assumes a lot about its users table -- it would take a lot of hacking to get it to accept drupal's users table as a substitute). So I just switched to using drupal's forums. One of the things that I sorely missed was being able to assign moderators to the forums.

Here's a patch that creates another node.module role "toggle nodes sticky". Users with that role can toggle the "sticky at top of lists" flag on nodes, which in forums, makes items show up at the top of forum topic listings, similar to the "announcement" or "sticky" functionality in common BB software.

Index: modules/node.module
===================================================================
--- modules/node.module	(revision 5662)
+++ modules/node.module	(working copy)
@@ -580,7 +584,7 @@
  * Implementation of hook_perm().
  */
 function node_perm() {
-  return array('administer nodes', 'access content');
+  return array('administer nodes', 'access content', 'toggle nodes sticky');
 }
 
 /**
@@ -1614,6 +1618,7 @@
    * Node author information
    */
 
+  $sticky_form_element = array('#type' => 'checkbox', '#title' =>t('Sticky at top of lists'), '#default_value' => in_array('sticky', $node_options));
   if (user_access('administer nodes')) {
     $form['author'] = array('#type' => 'fieldset', '#title' => t('Authoring information'), '#collapsible' => TRUE, '#collapsed' => TRUE, '#weight' => -5);
     $form['author']['name'] = array('#type' => 'textfield', '#title' => t('Authored by'), '#maxlength' => 60, '#autocomplete_path' => 'user/autocomplete', '#required' => TRUE, '#default_value' => $node->name, '#weight' => -1);
@@ -1628,9 +1633,12 @@
     $form['options']['status']   = array('#type' => 'checkbox', '#title' => t('Published'), '#default_value' => in_array('status', $node_options));
     $form['options']['moderate'] = array('#type' => 'checkbox', '#title' => t('In moderation queue'), '#default_value' => in_array('moderate', $node_options));
     $form['options']['promote']  = array('#type' => 'checkbox', '#title' => t('Promoted to front page'), '#default_value' => in_array('promote', $node_options));
-    $form['options']['sticky']   = array('#type' => 'checkbox', '#title' =>t('Sticky at top of lists'), '#default_value' => in_array('sticky', $node_options));
+    $form['options']['sticky']   = $sticky_form_element;
     $form['options']['revision'] = array('#type' => 'checkbox', '#title' =>t('Create new revision'), '#default_value' => in_array('revision', $node_options));
   }
+  else if (user_access('toggle nodes sticky')) {
+    $form['options']['sticky']   = $sticky_form_element;
+  }
 
   $nodeapi = node_invoke_nodeapi($node, 'form');
   if (is_array($nodeapi)) {

I'll probably be posting more patches that I have running on my site on this thread. My eventual goal would be to have them checked into CVS, so that I don't have to maintain them.