What Features do you use?

[Tristan]

So here's the story: my evil grand scheme for DCATZ has me moving the site to an all-powerful content management platform, details of which I have discussed previously.  Out of the box, it handles forums, but that department of the software is ... rather basic.  But there are a bunch of modifications that can be made to improve the forums.

That said, I'd like to know what settings you use here on a regular basis, or what you might be okay without.  That way, I can configure the new software accordingly for the most-used features and skip over those that don't get used.

I think the most used features are:
-Avatars
-WYSIWYG (where you click the bold, italic, and other buttons above the post window and the text in the post window responds accordingly instead of just being wrapped in [tags])
-Photo and Document Attachments
-New post icons
-Polls

But I'm more skeptical about features like:
-Post reply notifications
-"Help"
-Collapsing and expanding various forums
-Message icons
-Smileys
-Announced topics
-"Alt" shortcuts
-Preview
-Spell Check?
-Gender indication (has a female ever even SEEN this site?)
-Those "Email, Instant Message, PM" buttons underneath a username in a post
-Private Messages in general?
-Does anyone care about rank and stars and stuff?
-Calendar?
-The "Jump to" box at the bottom of the page

I bet there are more features that never really get used either...but does anyone disagree with any that I've listed, or have any others that they really like or really ignore?  Yes, the second question is inherently difficult to answer.

[Tritransit Area]

I do like the spell check, smileys (that can automatically generate), and private messages!

[Scrabbleship]

I think a few of the SO's of members of this board might have looked at this once  .

Seriously: Keep the smileys, keep the shortcuts, keep private messages, keep spell check, and keep the polls. It was impossible to find polls under the old format and frankly I think they've been underutilized because they've been so hard to find.