The site's currently using Drupal since I needed to put something together quickly. I like its content management system but I despise its forum (the forum is just treated as another content type - that's why "replying" to a forum thread is in fact identical to "commenting" on a news story). It also has no useful download module.

I'd like to switch to something else but I need to do a bit of research. What I want to avoid is having a homebrew mix of SMF, MediaWiki, a blog, a CMS, and custom code. I did that for a site before and it's a real pain making them all use the same visual theme and the same user authentication.

Ahh, i see your point. Visual theming is (in my experience) somewhat trivial, but time consuming. User authentication could prove problematic though....

In any case, I looked into drupal. I have never heard of it, but it seems nice. I looked around and found two modules that should provide the functionality i requested. (I do understand that you may not have time, and it is probably more important to work on gootool, than to add useful functionality for the handful of forum users. Do you think you are going to stay with drupal or use something else? )

http://drupal.org/project/comment_notify
http://drupal.org/project/comment_subscribe

I don't know about sticking with Drupal. I need to look into the options here.

I've installed comment_notify: one nice thing about Drupal is how easy it is to add modules that someone has already written

Sweet! Thanks

~Jonas