Please...I'm begging you.
The Shoutbox is cool and all, and I use it occasionally for short stuff, but it's really not the ideal place to do trades and have long group convos about stuff.
And on top of that it makes the site look dead as a doornail when people ignore the forums in favor of a fast moving box on the side of the screen :/
(Personally I think that's part of why the community has issues getting along sometimes but that's for another day)
I think park of this would also include introducing pings get people to come back to threads. I often want to tall about things with people or do sales, but I don't know if they'll ever get back to it because I can't ping them.
Forum subions are cool bit I don't want an alert for ever other user that posts.