I want something such that people can tag an article "ICO-Research" first and then it shows up under ChainBB cleanly. Is this doable?
It is, though it feels like a very specific topic. What about just a generic ICO forum? That seems to be a bit more broad and potentially house more topics. Promoting only specific posts within a tag seems more like the steemit interface rather than chainBB.
What about having it so posts are ranked by upvotes (or by $ earned) and not by recency? Is that doable?
It is doable, but not a high priority right now. I'm still very focused on the forum format which is based on bumping posts via the last reply time.
My idea is to bootstrap quality ICO research articles on Steem by means of ChainBB and my Steem power's curation abilities.
Curation doesn't really play into chainBB - I think that's where the UX confusion around all of this comes from. Discussions should be bumped because they're being discussed - not because people with large wallets want it to be.
Overall I think what you're really looking for is the upcoming communities feature that steemit is working on. It sounds exactly like what they're building a protocol for. Once it's built, I'll definitely have forum support for it, but I don't want to duplicate their efforts right out of the gate.
I think it's a solid idea though :)
A general ICO tag works but included in that will be a lot of ads and a lot of junk. I wanted to create more specificity on purpose to cultivate something from scratch. I'll tease it out and look forward to Communities!
Re: last reply vs $ voted. What if things were sorted like Reddit, based on # of upvotes? Might that have a place?