Jarmel, this is exactly what we're aiming for. Posters from the forum will have their rich content posts included as comments too, if appropriate. Publishing select threads to the front might also be interesting.
MV, thanks, I had missed a target attribute when I rebuilt the thumbnail engine. You're correct that relying on a third party for something as crucial as comments is very unappealing. It's not a very nice thing to say, but also we would likely gain very little from their community type features.
Dingo, you can indeed remove such code. Not sure if people would prefer that in by default, although adding them themselves would be difficult.
Zippy, I believe you just need to clear cookies.