It was very good to add messaging in the forums and, like ourselves, I'm sure it is appreciated by many users. But now social interaction is fundamental to the web and users of the forum module have a conundrum since they will often want messaging in other parts of their sites. If they use the messaging in Forums, it cannot be used outside forums. If they turn it off in Forums and implement another messaging system the result is two messaging systems in one site, which is confusing and very inconveniet for users (need always to check two places for messages). Since Forums already has a nice messaging system, it jumps out that it would be very helpful if this same system could be used outside of Forums. Your success with messaging has created an external need due to the social evolution of the web.
If we turn messaging off in Forums we then need to integrate or implement another messaging system. While there are third party options, we don't believe the hooks exist in Forums (as variables exposing fields needed in an aspx page) to enable this in a straightforward manner.
This would seem to be a straightforwad architecturre extension:
1) Since Messaging can be turned off it could be made independet , so it could be used outside Forums as well as turned off inside Forums.
2) Forums itself could be tweaked so it could use a single messaging system across the whole site (outside of Forums).
Even if just 2) were done it would be a major architectural step since a site could then turn off the messaging in Forums and then integrate another messaging system into Forums, which could be used throughout the site.
This architecture is availabel in MyMessages and ActiveForums, but we are loathe to use third party modules except as a last resort since the Forums module is so central to the DotNetNuke community. It helps DotNetNuke to thrive if the Forums module continues to evolve!
The fact that not all sites may use social networking modalities doesn't mean that DotNukeNet architecture should make things difficult for those who do. Modularization is good. With a separation of messaging everything that can be done now still could be, but a few important capabilities would be added.
Even if there is no response to this need the Forums module is a great help and much appreciated. Users are able to modify the source code and get things done. The issues then are that it then becomes difficult to upgrade to new versions easily, and multiple developers tend to have to do the same work themselves, and in ways that reflect only their perspective so it doesn't become part of the mainline code.
Forums is a wonderful module having many of the needed capabilities. We have managed to control its function programmatically (basic functions called by the user interface can't simply be called by user module code). Although it lacks Search in the normal sense of the word ( in real search, multiple words in a search are treated as a phrase and only found if they occur as a literal phrase in messages), and messaging is not separate, we still appreciate it as a starting point.