That's sad to hear that you don't like the forums.
Have you read the article
About Thread Tags? If not, please do.
In any case, I'm afraid setting up a cross-system authentication system would be a technological nightmare. With the sheer number of different forum systems out there, all of them utilizing their own different password hashing mechanisms, it'd be an incredible task to address.
The process of syncing passwords without direct database access, or anything like that is simple beyond the scope of something we could reasonably establish.
In this case, your best bet, if you wish to utilize another forum system is to simply provide a link to the other forum.
All that said, though, there are some enhancements coming for the forums that might appeal to you. User-defined Thread Tags, so sub-groups could establish their own thread tags, as well as a few other neat forum tweaks are already in development.
I'm pretty proud to say that the forum system after the next version will be just about the easiest to use and most feature-rich of all forum systems. The only real lacking thing at this point is the fact that there isn't a rich-text editor built in, but that's also on the plan list to get finished.
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The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.
