Since you are very familiar with the current software used on the old cis forums, care to offer any ideas about some useful functionality there might be something for me to consider.

Hmm. There's such a wide range of functions that it would be difficult to single out any; they're sort of a suite, or a set of suites, if that makes any sense. Maybe if you have time, you could read our Forum User's Manual, which I co-wrote and edited. It's in HTML, and there are a couple of links to it on our forum hime page at http://community.compuserve.com/books. It covers pretty much everything that a user would want to do. I'm working on a new edition right now, but the current edition is only a few months old.

As to staff functions, they're what you'd expect, but the message moving suite of tools is the best I've seen anywhere. You can rename a thread, move a thread to a different section, prune a message (move it and all its replies to any section, and optionally rename it at the same time), graft a discussion (move a pruned thread to attach it to an existing thread, anywhere in the thread), and transplant (which is moving an entire thread to attach it to another). Those capabilities are probably far beyond what is needed here, but they sure are nice over there.

If I think of anything else in the staff tools that is really handy, I'll let you know.