[snark]

Thanks for the links, @r-a-y — those discussions were helpful, and I can see that this has been an ongoing discussion for at least the last couple months.

For now I’ve disabled Forum replies in the activity stream, to avoid the “forked conversation” issue of having some topic relies in the Forum and some in the AS. I’m still wrestling with the whole Groups thing and the Groups comment box at the top of each Groups page — I know for a fact that when I open this up to 10k+ members of my current forum, many, many of them will just start posting their topics in the Group page, rather than creating a Topic in a Group Forum. Maybe I should just open it all up and let it be chaotic, and let the user community figure out how to self-regulate?

The other thing I’m still looking for is a sitewide Favorites option, so users can mark Forum Topics, Group AS posts, or blog posts as Favorites — currently you can only do that with Group AS posts. It looks like @JohnJamesJacoby is working on such a plugin — see https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/favorite-button-available-on-singlephp — which hopefully will be ready soon and solve this particular issue.