Uh, where to start... Let me first express how important forums are - I absolutely hate mailing lists (even tho most of the projects I'm contributing to are handled that way) and I solemnly swear that I won't develop and contribute, heck I won't even shake a stick at anything that is handled by mailing lists ever again! Forums have much easier structure to follow, threading is much better and it doesn't depend on particular user's mail client, you can do more detailed searches, you can have far better data structure and you can easily ignore noise, and all that in a fairly easy and user friendly manner. And that's what puts forum systems ahead of any `social networking` system I have ever seen. Forums just work! Same goes for IRC, I left that type of communication in mid '90s and times of BBS, and I have no desire to go back to that...
Fyi, I'm testing an add-on that I made that forces a user to register at meego.com first before registering on the vB forum (in sandbox) so usernames would always match. Hopefully this will make it easier for future integration. It's working well but am open for any better solutions.