One of the common features on forum is called the moderated forum. This type of forum allows users to create posts but those posts don’t appear until a moderator has a chance to read through them and then approve them. Non approved posts are usually deleted.
While thinking about this type of functionality, I thought of a cool way to create very interesting work flows on the forums. As new posts are created and then approved, they move through a series of different forums until they end up at their destination. So for each forum you can set it to be moderated and then choose the destination forum for new content. So if you create a new post in a moderated forum, it is moved to the forum you setup as the destination. Then when the post is approved, it is moved to the next destination.
Lets say I have five forums: Bugs, Bug Reports – Bug Confirmed – Bug Fixed – Bug Tested – Bug Killed. When I create a new post in Bugs, it automatically moves to Bug Reports and awaits moderation. A moderator reads it and then clicks the approve button. This post now moves to Bug Confirmed. Then another moderator does his thing and then click approve and the post moves to Bug Fixed. When the process is done, the bug entry ends up at the Bug Killed forum. What is nice about this process is that you can have some of the forums set to private so they are hidden from other users, you can control security on each forum so that only certain people can work with posts in certain forums.
I think a feature like this would have a lot of good use scenarios and it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to implement.