Well, it's complicated. You may have noticed that when you mouse-over some links in the front part of the site, a little call-out box appears that describes the destination. That's the result of a script that calls on the bookmarks database for information about the link. There wouldn't be a practical way to migrate that to the forum.
Google sets something called "pagerank" based on the number of inbound links to a site. Google also penalizes sites when they have lots of outbound links. Amaz0ns' pagerank dropped earlier this year when I did a good bit of necessary housecleaning on the site, which pissed off Google because it changed the URL format of pages. You probably never noticed that it happened, but Google did. Amaz0ns pagerank dropped by about 10% and has yet to climb back up. Eventually it will, but I'm impatient.
The amount of money a site can make from Google Adsense is affected by pagerank. For reasons I won't go into here, it's much harder to make money from online advertising in the summer than during the rest of the year. So I am trying to get a pagerank bump by reducing the number of outbound links on the site. Make sense?
Also, most of the sites in the bookmarks database have never linked back. So I am a little tired of throwing some of Amaz0ns pagerank to them, when they don't reciprocate.
Another reason I've been stripping down Amaz0ns features is that Amaz0ns is too big for its hosting plan, and it's using the largest plan the current webhost offers. What this has meant over the last few months is that Amaz0ns crashes several times a day, for a few minutes at a time. By cutting down some of the non-core features, I've got the crashes down to a handful per week instead of five or six per day.
Another tactic I've tried to make this work is to spawn new sites, such as:
http://muscularmedia.comhttp://shulkie.comhttp://brawna.orghttp://buffvideo.comThat way when I have an idea for a new feature, I can roll it out on one of those other sites, on a different hosting plan.
I'll see what I can do about coming up with a solution to the bookmarks problem. I may just make them available to logged-in users.