Not all forum software has this built in, some some forums, such as VBulletin has this feature. You can set up a posting bot to pull news feeds from certain sites, and then post a thread on the news article. Its an easy way to get fresh content and fill up your forum.
Whilst I do agree, I know that many people despise RSS bots. A lot of people add RSS bots to their forum when it starts to die-down in order to make the site seem active. In my opinion, it's a bit of a spammy way to fill up the forum. I have a totally different opinion if the forum is active though. There are some niches that rely on news sources, and in that case a RSS feed isn't a bad idea. In short, if the sole intention of the RSS bot is to make the forum seem active and just fill it up, then it isn't a good idea.
In particular " ... we are also producing a new content management system to facilitate the creation, editing and publishing of non-forum pages. " I don't know the details of what is intended by "non-forum pages." If it is some sort of a web-page publisher that's interesting.
If you are going to use RSS feeds then I would advise you to block search engines from the forum they feed to, Google especially will penalise you for copying content. It's best to feed it to a forum in an admin only section, and then re-write it before posting it up on the public forum.
It's not all that bad though. At the end of the day Google still indexes feeds in it's search results for your site posted on a forum that gets you extra traffic coming. More traffic than you normally would get if not pulling it in, more so if not much forum activity from members is going on. So who cares about ranking... when Google is still indexing more content from your site than it normally would. Depends also how you use feeds. I pull them in specific to 3-4 keywords being included in the feed and only pull in 1 feed every 2 hours max. I average though only about 1 or 2, maybe 3 feeds at most per day coming in (usually 1 only most of time per day, some days none at all come in) so the forum is not getting flooded with feeds and the forum in question they get posted on can be ignored by members anyhow... which will remove all feeds displayed throughout the board to them. But if you're just going to pull in as many feeds as possible each day, doing that is pointless and WILL only annoy members and turn people away big time from joining because it's too much coming in daily, way too overbearing. Just bring in a very few each day, 1 or 2 at most and use keywords to bring in all same type of related news.
Doing that would defeat the whole object of using RSS Feed really. Which is to make life easier getting some content listed without you having do anything getting it. If you're going to import feeds into a hidden forum first and then rewrite them posted on a public forum manually, you might as well not bother using RSS Feed. Anyway, if you're pulling feeds in from sites like BCC News. Part of the policy using their feeds is that you leave the feeds untouched.
