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I think that you may find that more than one or all of the above have been posted to the bug tracker which is the place for feature requests. If you do an advanced search for the forum related feature requests and make a list of them here, then perhaps people may vote for them.

Adam -

Some good points there. As Tim mentions, the bug tracker is the natural home for things like this, although there's no harm in people discussing them in the forums of course.

A couple of the features you mention already exist in Moodle:

• "Non-graded polling" - use the "choice" tool, which does exactly that. I know it isn't directly in the forum page, but that's such a small difference. (You can use the "choice block" to make it appear in a sidebar.)
• "mark all as read" - that already exists - click on the tick-mark icon at the top of the list.

I think the option for "sticky threads" (as you mention) is one which would be easy to implement and would be very useful. It's stored as bug 1997 - sign up to the bugtracker and vote for it!

It's a bit of a hassle to not be able to auto-quote, but unfortunately, since sometimes it seems that 90% of people don't bother to trim those auto-quotes when they have that option, we are a lot better off without them. I've noticed when a forum has a "reply" and a "reply with quote" option, people are more likely to trim when they use "reply with quote" than they would with auto-quote.

Multiple posts in Moodle CAN be split into new threads, as long as they are in response to the first post you want to split.

Many of these request come up quite a lot. I suspect eventually they will all get implemented, just because they get asked for again and again.

I would however like to point out that many of the features you are talking about are common only to Bulletin Board or Forum software, that is I mean software that only does forums has has no other features. This means they need to put all their community building tools into forum posts. For example:

• Bulletin Board feature -> Moodle features
• sticky posts -> resources, wikis and the intro text for a forum
• poll posts -> choices, surveys, questionnaire, feedback module, quiz

Then there is the fact that most of these forum tools are unthreaded. This design choice means that many things are done differently because multiple conversations are intertwined, not linked in the database but only because people quote a post further up the discussion:

• auto-quoting -> reply to a specific post
• split multiple posts -> split a thread at its root and all child posts follow

Some other things in your list are good ideas, they're just clearly influenced by a different way of doing things e.g. if you want a busy forum with lots of moderators that aren't necessarily trusted teachers then why not make a social format course, which is seperate from all the actual teaching courses? 'Teachers' in that course have no extra rights in other parts of the Moodle unless explicitly given them. (I think Moodle 1.7 is implementing a feature like this anyway, but more generally so you can have different 'teachers' responsible for different course sections and activity etc.)

As I said I think these ideas will eventually be implemented anyway. It's very difficult to defend intentionally not implementing a feature. I think that's part of why most software gets bloated and more difficult to use over time (e.g. Microsoft Office) unless you have someone with an iron will ensuring that it doesn't happen and things remain coherent and focused (e.g. see Apple software/hardware or the Mozilla-Firefox transition).