I would be really nice if an admin (non-developer) could add custom fields for a user forum profile. Since a given portal forum may have a very specific business focus, adding a custom field would be super groovy.

Also, the ability of a user to attach a picture to their profile that is displayed when a another user clicks on their profile would be downright spiffy.

Crispy:

On the topic of User Customization: a while back I added a 'media gallery' functionality to the commercial Active Forums product for a small contract. The functionality is very portable, supports multiple media types including all Windows Media Player supported types, Flash using Netbrick.dll, and of course images.

If there is any interest in incorporating it into the forum user profile I would happily post it on my site for your use. One minor problem which will need correcting is that images are reprocessed / served via a image.aspx file. The file caches the processed image once it has been viewed, but on active site, this would most likely bring server to a stand-still. Images would need to be batch processable as well as processed when they are first uploaded into thumb & display sizes.

The images are stored in the portal upload directory, in a configurable subdirectory:

portals\0\modulename\idnumber\images...

As suggested, this should be modified to place thumbnails in a separate thumbnail directory and display images in a separate images dierctory, much like TTTGallery.

Thanks. I understand the reason to keep the profile information out of the forum module. In fact I would prefer this, since I have other modules that would need to take advantage of the profile data.

At any rate, I would like to give you more of a "use case" around my use of the forums module, so perhaps it might give you ideas in the future.

I have a site that uses the forums module to provide my users to post "personal" ads. It is sort of like a dating web site, where users can post to a "men seeking women" or "women seeking men" type of dating request. The need for a user to remain anonymous to the membership at large is essential, but it would be nice to allow them to create a more personal "My Profile" page which would allow some, but not all information to be public. Additionally, it would be nice for a user to be able to accept a private message or ignore private messages from other users. This would allow users to share their personal information with individuals only when they felt comfortable to do so. Another feature that would be very useful is the ability to categorize and display users within the forum. In other words, a user might want to see a list of users who are of a specific gender within their own town. This capability would obviously need to be more generic to support other types of sites/forums, but the basic premise of categorization would be nice.

I realize these types of capabilities (with the exception of private messages) might seem a little out of scope for a forums module. The forums module, however, provides many other features that make it a great candidate for doing this type of site. I am only posting my use case because I hope it gives you ideas for innovation.

If you perhaps know of any other complimentary modules that might accomodate my needs, I would appreciate you letting me know. I am a developer, and I can build this stuff, but that is not really my business focus at the moment. I am absolutely swamped building and supporting my site at the moment. I would, however, gladly purchase and support others who are in the business of creating great modules.

Thanks again!