In reply to:
Scream is well known to *never* keep an eye on the opposition
I hope that's not entirely the case... Believe me, in customizing my forum, I have probably been to every competing product site to see what features they have that I want, how others have designed sites, etc... And it's mainly because I know what I want on my forums, but I'm always open to cool ideas. I've tried to build my system around w3t that will match and beat ubb, vbulletin and espn forums, and even w3t to some extent, and I think I've done it.
Right now the only thing vbulletin has that I don't is the info on the main page that shows total reg'd users / threads / topics, last member and active topics (at least the last time I looked). The only reason I don't have them implemented yet is that my site isn't even live yet and I don't want to show 5 topics on my main page... And since from what I've seen with vBulletin really being a UBB clone, there isn't anything UBB really has that I don't have. And as for espn, the only thing they have that I don't is their recommendation feature, where you can recommend posts as another alternative for rating them compared to views.
And I think there are plenty of things I have that one or another of these don't - quasi-subcategories, a useful working poll, linking to the last post from the forum listing, limiting posts to last x days, poster info on each message (which gets updated daily so as not to show old titles), linking to replies in flat mode (okay, it only works when there are two pages or less), special notes in forums with no posts yet or in last x days, error info trapping into a separate table, importing users from a flat text file and probably a few other things I have forgotten. And the only thing I'm really waiting on to launch is a little feedback from my visitors and for someone to finish up all new buttons/icons for me.
