Regrettably Jive doesn't support Message Boards/Wall Posts. If they had it, it would certainly be enabled. There aren't requests from their other customers for something similar, so the likelihood that it could be easily built and supported for the long term is slim. And it's bigger than just designing what you see. There is logic that goes into how and when notifications are sent. Database considerations and much much more. Also it would be a huge expense to implement and maintain. If we build something, we want it to be good.
The notification system was horrible on elgg. It required you to continually go back to the message board and check to see if the owner had replied. You wouldn't get a notification if they replied to your post. Additionally there were the people who posted on their own message boards and were talking with themselves.
For @mentions, you don't have to follow the person. So long as you haven't turned off notifications about @mentions in your Preferences, you should receive a notification that someone has @mentioned you. So if you want to check in with someone and have a semi-private conversation you can do so via the Status Update. They'll get notified and the discussion will occur on your profile. It just won't be one long stream. It will be broken up into specific Status Updates.
I realize that the wall was nice but it was very far from perfect. It was hard to see history past the last 5-10 messages. People interacting with you weren't notified when you responded back to their post. There were no @mention capabilities. Inserting media was a challenge. New members posted on their own message boards looking for help but because it wasn't as visible they didn't always get it unless someone checked out their profile. There was no way to reply by email.
All communities are faced with people taking things off-topic. It happened on Elgg as well. There was no way for me to branch it. I can branch topics now on Jive and can do them at your request. I don't monitor and look at every discussion/blog/question so I don't always know when things go off-topic. If I see something that is grossly going off-topic I would probably address it but for the most part I am pretty hands-off here. There is a certain amount of self-policing a community should do in terms of making sure that discussions stay on-topic and if it goes off, just take it elsewhere. 
And by self-policing, I don't mean dealing with the troublemakers who come periodically and threaten the normal order of things around here.
crazymama_Lori You can create streams in My EX Feed but that is more for following certain types of content or people. It's more or less grouping content together.
Since we moved we're seeing that new members are more engaged and more likely to create content. You as established members are seeing that content and it's not getting hidden and un-responded to. We're seeing less spam now. Spam getting posted on profiles and on message boards was a major issue. I cleaned up thousands of message board spam posts and private messages that contained spam as well. (We haven't forgotten about those and as soon as a bug is fixed, hopefully the historical message board posts and private messages will be imported).
Thanks for your ongoing feedback.
Mark
EX Community Manager
