This is a very useful and highly active feature on my SMF forums. I've already bought a full IPB license recently, so after converting, i'm hoping to still have access to this functionality, even if it's going to be in 3.3, i can wait. Basically, here is how it works. When a member visits a board. There is a pinned topic in that board, which contains a list of all of the topics in that board. The list of topics contain the titles of all topics which can be clicked to visit the topic. The list is ordered alphabetically. On SMF, it has to be updated manually via a modification, but i'm hoping that IPB can do it one step further and better, by allowing an option in the ACP where the List of Topics can be scheduled to update automatically every x days.

You could probably do something like that with a hook. And as it would pull from the database, it would be updated every time you refreshed the page.

I know you could do it with IP.Content, but it would be on a seperate page from the forum list.

It is a small but useful feature, and i really don't think buying IP.Content is the solution in this case. It's a nifty feature that can be easily integrated into the next release of IPB. My members use this a lot to know at one look (the topics are listed in a very compact way from A to Z) what the board they are visiting contains, without having to scroll through several pages as they currently have to, in IPB.

If you have any programming experience, hooks are free. :) If IPS see's this as a useful addon, then it very well could be integrated into a next version... But if not, it's probably pretty easy to accomplish with a hook. Then you don't have to wait for a new version from IPS.

Unfortunately, i'm out of the programming loop, so i guess it's all up to IPS or a 3rd-party developer.

I don't think this is a realistic feature I'm afraid.

Large sites with 50,000 topics in a forum, for instance, wouldn't stand a chance with something like this. Even if the resources could be found to generate such a list, the page output would be humongous.

Something like this works ok on small sites I understand, but we gear our software to sites of all sizes. As such, something like this is best left to a third party hook IMO, primarily because it cannot be effectively utilized by all of our customers (we can't just tell some customers "you'll have to disable this feature").