I have never understood why Stardock insists on developing their own forum software when there are plenty of open source solutions available that do everything right out of the box.
Two reasons:
1. Most forum software is written in PHP/MySQL whereas we work with .NET and SQL Server. While there are forum packages out there written in .NET, they are generally either bloated due to having features we don't care for, or aren't easily modifiable.
2. Our forums are heavily integrated into various parts of Stardock and Impulse (and will be even more in the future). For example, we utilize a single login system across all of our sites. In the future we will have even more in-operability with various Stardock projects like Impulse, Wincustomize, and Ready To Play. Having a codebase that we developed for the forums will allow us to add features quickly and easily.
Of course, there's also the matter of priorities and time. No code is perfect, and every forum has bugs. It would take as much time to update some other forum package, implement our additions and changes all over again, and then push the update as it would to just change our forum code directly and push an update.
So yes, there are other solutions, and we may take a look at them again sometime to see if they allow us to do what we want, but for the time being we will stick with our solution and do what we can to keep everyone happy 
Bara
