Whoa! The [Open]ACS 4 bulletin board is NOT based on the ACS 3.x bboard package, not at all. It's very different and while I have complaints about its under-the-hood implementation (which to some degree first I, and now OF, have worked on cleaning up) the feature set's a bit nicer than the old boards.
As part of dotLRN OF will indeed have to provide a level of e-mail integration not seen in the past, as ACES 3.5 (aka SloanSpace) does provide this.
Gilbert's effort looks pretty nice, but I do have some questions about it, i.e. how much of what I'm looking at is templated vs. built in?
My personal preference is for a standard templated package to provide lean and sparse output that can then be built on when customizing sites (making more use of the template system's ability to use master/slave chains, includes, etc in order to make it easy to whack away at look and feel in a handful of places rather than page-by-page through the system).
I didn't play around enough to see if it allows image and other attachment uploads, unthreaded as well as threaded bboards, etc.
One thing to recognize, though, is that no group of people larger than three or four are ever going to agree on look and feel and feature set for a bulletin board package. That's why I don't mind our having two to choose from. In many ways having separate packages to meet differing sets of opinions regarding "the perfect bboard" makes a heck of a lot more sense than trying to write a single uber-bboard that fits everyone's taste and preference.
