Some suggestions I think will be really useful...
- Related Topics before new topics- JQuery
One problem I always face is repeated topics. Doesn´t matter how hard you try to educate users, they don´t search before posting. So... I think it would be really easy to implemente a small section between topic subject and the message itself to show related topics.
So... it would work this way - User will type the topic subject as ever... but each time he type a blank space (or when he change focus on the subject cell), a search would be made with all the subject words and the top 10 topics found on this search would be diplayed.
This doesn´t solve the problem completly, but I think it can help a lot! And also brings the benefit of the user, specially new ones, to find a good related interesting topic.
- Facebook Style replies
Maybe this one is harder... but would be good to have your reply posted in a topic withou having to reload all the page... as facebook does. Would be also be a resource saver.
All this stuff could be done with jQuery