Ethan —
A few thoughts:
1. What do you mean by “pull tweets into CBOX”? Are you thinking of something like what we have on the CUNY Academic Commons ( https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/twitter/ ), which pulls tweets from hashtags, user accounts, and lists onto a page, or are you hoping to have tweets feed into group feeds and notifications? I believe all of that is possible in different ways, but it depends on what you want.
2. You can think about allowing twitter/facebook accounts to be used to authenticate logins to the CBOX site, which might make it easier for people to get in and out of the CBOX space
3. I’m assuming you have reply-by-email activated, but if not, you should — it will allow users to reply to forum threads by clicking “reply” from their email accounts
4. Reply-by-email also allows people to create group posts through addresses that are unique to their accounts. But the addresses are a bit messy/convoluted, and can’t really be memorized since they contain long strings of randomized characters. we are working on a new thing for the CUNY Academic Commons (and I think we have released it is a CBOX plugin, though Ray can confirm) that allows people to set specific addresses for groups so that when users want to start new threads, they just have to write an email to the group address (which can be something like my-group-name@siteaddress.edu — e.g. dh@groups.commons.gc.cuny.edu ). This will make posting to groups more like posting to a listserv
But a lot of this depends on how you have set up your site and how you are using it — ie, are you using blogs and groups?
I hope that some of this is helpful!
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