Don't quite follow the thing about replying to replies. You did that successfully a couple of threads down...must be I don't get the question.

I added software to the editor so that it's supposed to load preset for the current forum. It has to make some educated guesses to do so, so we might be seeing a case I didn't test for under which it breaks. Does it come up not set all the time? More work needed...

I need to explain a lot more about the system being represented by those checkboxes. They're taxonomies in WordPress lingo, a way of categorizing posts that I use to virtualize one blog into many forums. Since I was in a hurry, I used two taxonomies from the university project. "Topics" is appropriate, but you may have wondered about "Organizations". That's an artifact, organizing forums for departments in the school. I'll probably remove it soon, so stick with Topics.

Since you knew that a box needed to be checked to make the post show up in a particular forum, I'll bet you've wondered what will happen if you check multiple boxes. Answer is, just what you think will happen: Cross-posting. But because it's one message getting posted multiple places, virtually, not copies, no resources are wasted, there's no worry about different copiesof the message evolving different discussions and diverging, and really, from a moderator's point of view, the only reason to worry about cross-posting any more is the purely behavioral problem of spamming. Otherwise, cross-posting can likely prove useful under some circumstances.

Another thing i can expound on in more detail later is that, because the core software is widely-used and very popular, there's a huge array of plugins available to dress it up and customize it. We can grow and develop the site using all sorts of free software in the WordPress "ecosystem".

I've been working intensively with WordPress for about six months now, and I can guarantee that we're going to have a much smoother and more enjoyable experience than that other damned package ever gave us. This is solid software. Amazon's disaster did us a favor, I think.