Education on Educational Forums

Wow, Turbine on V7 forum really knows his stuff. I've been looking for some advice on forums so I emailed him this.

1. I've been trying to tightly link some blogs and forums. My idea is that articles would go into the blog but the discussion could be in a forum. Have you seen any good examples of how to do this? I'm thinking that web home school or homeschool online could be used to stimulate discussion.

2. Along the same lines, I have a newsletter which invites feedback with a link to a thread starting with the same topic in my forum. This has some success. Specifically, the thread gets huge numbers of views but I don't seem to have found topics that alot of people want to comment on. My most successful is: "Why did you start homeschooling"

3. Take a look at my forum. One of it's purposes is SEO (not the links on the bottom). Other is to show that we have a vibrant community and a third if for member support. Does it look like it's well-implemented? Any obvious ideas for my homeschooling forum?

4. I had some people develop a site for me using joomla. We launched this month. Along with my long list of other complaints is that the forum uses Fireboard. Any experience in that area? Spelling forum.