Not sure if this is doable or not, but I thought I would throw it out there for discussion.

I was reading about Google's new Google News Badges feature and it gave me an idea.

Would there be a way to suggest topics based on what a member has read or on personal settings? I could see a sidebar or portal feature where you could push recommended topics to the individual user.

Check this topic: http://community.inv...similar-topics/

Is that what you mean?

Kind of. But I don't want to have to rely on tags for it to work. My members would never be able to figure that out. It should be based on their personal settings and behavior.

I also think there should be a "related posts" section in each topic. For example for my blog I have a plugin that shows related posts and it doesn't rely on tags, it builds it's own database using the titles and the body text and it's surprisingly accurate.

That's the kind of feature you need serious server power for. It's unrealistic to write a holistic matching engine based on user's past posts and status updates in a forum system that has to run in a shared server environment.

That's the kind of feature you need serious server power for. It's unrealistic to write a holistic matching engine based on user's past posts and status updates in a forum system that has to run in a shared server environment.

I kind of figured that. There would have to be a lot of background processes going on to serve up suggestions.