MyBB Community Forums

Right, guys, this has been requested to me and I'd love it if someone able were to create this plugin.

Part one (the plugin)

What is the plugin?
The plugin would show highlighted forum discussions (or branded as highlighted forum posts) on the home page. These discussions are highlighted by moderator / admin because they are good, hot or interesting topics. The actual forums are now on a separate page. An idea is to have highlighted posts on the root and the actual forum categories on /forums.

Why is this good
Diving the user directly into some exciting threads will engage them in discussion.

Example sites
These are all VB, which has a massive plugin list and social features. This plugin is key for me. Example sites, these are massive, huge successful sites and it shows this is a great plugin idea.

www.webmasterworld.com
www.sitepoint.com/forums/

I can go on and on but they are really the examples needed.

Part two (social features)
Why?
If forum users feel connected with other users they'll stick around. Building relationships is key with forums and if there is no relationships users will leave. I've noticed very few big MyBB forums, not being harsh but true. My forum has 125,000 posts, all of the users are now friends through socializing, its a reason they come back, and back and back. If we allow users to create groups, and have VB style features, forums would be more fun! It's why facebook is a success. VB - a huge company wouldn't implement such features if it wasn't needed. I know MyBB wants to stay forum specific but this stuff is needed for us to have successful forums IMO.

Notice

If you don't like my ideas, I'd appreciate it if you didn't be aggressive, better still don't reply. I dont see why people would object to having social features.

Thanks for reading.

Good idea...
Sitepoint uses this to assist people in find interesting threads, and it does help.
Creating and updating it manually on a homepage would be pretty easy, and a plugin sounds even better.

I agree that MyBB needs to stop being so scared of social functions. However, MyNetwork looks to alleviate a lot of that.

imho MyBB should keep a forum system. However some basic social networking features would help, such as a new profile design (this doesn't even apply as a real social network feature but eh..) and.. oh well, I really don't remember now. But there are lots of simple features you could take from vBulletin. MyBB needs to improve a little.
Even if MyNetwork is almost released, some features need to be added as CORE. And find a way to place MyNetwork in the downloads page. I think it's necessary as it's a huge modification of which every past vBulletin users were waiting, and so are new users. Just a thought..

Man I'd love to see these features.

Okay so the social things are coming with MyNetwork. But this plugin, I run a large webmaster forum and really want it to dive users straight in. Those two sites SP and WW both have that.

I don't think MyNetwork will have this feature. I recommend you to request for this feature in his thread.

I would pay for the plugin.

You have to. MyNetwork isn't free