It is very beneficial to small groups.
a link in the navigation must usually apply to all sections of the forums - if that link is not relevant to the other sections, why have it there.
On our site for example, we could easily have a dozen links per club that we support - none of these links would be valid to other clubs or remotely of interest. Therefore by having them under their sub-forum, the other clubs can just ignore them and they do not not clutter up the overall design.
If there was a way to have these 360 links on the navigation then we would.
To us (and many other sites) links as forums would streamline the entire site.
Our links might go to the league table for that club, their results, their fixtures, their website etc... These links would not be relevant to other clubs - as they would have their own links.
Ok - the majority of these links would be 100% hosted on our site, and some may be duplicated - but it would still be easy for people to find these other sections (or external pages) that are tailored to the forum that they are viewing.
A photography forum may have forums for canon users, nikon users etc. Beneath the canon forum, there may be links to canon articles, usergroups etc.
The only easy alternative to this is to have unique headers and footers for each forum (is this in 7 yet?) - and then these links could be placed in the header.
Just my own thoughts
