Trackback-enabled topics

[shakin]

Trackback [nofollow]-enabled topics would allow for some pretty cool conversations between sites. You might find an interesting topic on Site 1 that you think readers of Site 2 would like. You can add your reply on Site 2 trackbacked to the topic on Site 1 so everyone can read your reply in context. Site 1 then 'sees' that you've got a topic trackbacked to it, so when viewing that topic on Site 1 it links all the topics on other sites that are trackbacking it.

I'm not sure if it would be best to trackback to topics only, or individual posts.

There would have to be some URL blacklist control to stop other sites from using the trackback feature as advertisements, so you could blacklist anyone who did that. You could choose whether to allow all but blacklisted sites or only whitelisted sites.  Maybe an additional way to help prevent spam would be to give each board a whitelist of topic categories (eg. 'Import Cars' could be a topic category) and the administrator could prevent links from boards with dissimilar topic categories from appearing in a topic on their board.

[CapriSkye]

i haven't seen any forums with this feature yet, but it's pretty common with blogging software.
it'd be nice to have this feature though, and be the first one