I have a client whom I moved from a phpnuke to a DNN site.  They are very pleased with the enhancements from the one one platform to the next.  There are two features that the users have requested that they previously had in their old version.  Was wondering if anyone can tell me if the forums module can do either of these.

1.  On their old site they have a spin off module on the front page of their site that would show a scrolling ticker of the latest posts placed in the forum.  They would love to see this happen on the new site.  I know on a previous install of DNN I had a Whats New module, but that was not just for forums, they want forum specific.

2.  Latest forum release & Private messaging.  -  This site is for a online gaming community, and alot of these people like to use ascii characters and such in their names.  This creates a big cluster **## when trying to search the user names for sending a PM (this also goes along with the rest of user search in forum moderation and such.)  Is there any wild cards that can be used in the search box?  I have tried using substrings, but the search will not return any results unless search string is verbatim to data content.

Thank you for your help guys!