Zune Thoughts: Zune Cards in Our Forums: What's the Solution?

Someone asked in our forums what our plans were for the Zune cards - whether or not we had plans to allow the integration of Zune cards into our forums. I've been thinking about that since they were announced - you've probably noticed our forums here are quite..."clean" in terms of sigs. I really dislike forums where people have massive, ugly signatures with huge graphics. The signatures steal all the visual focus away from the message - they often look like virtual graffiti. It might be great for some forums and communities, but not this one. In our forums, the message the person is posting should be the most important thing - their sig is just something extra.

I'm just starting to think about how we might implement this. At the very least, if I want it to not look terrible, I think we'd have to customize the Zune Thoughts vBulletin template and expand the left-hand column that shows the username, # of posts, etc. The Zune card would have to fit in there - what sucks is how huge they made the Zune cards - I would have preferred to have an even smaller option for embedding, with some sort of a fly-out Flash function. The problem though is that I'm not sure if we can implement that in the template system without having to hack vBulletin - hacks make upgrades PAINFUL, so I never do it. Let me ponder this some more...but I'm definitely interested in ideas from the community, especially from people experienced with vBulletin and vBulletin template design. I still know much more about how phpBB works than vBulletin, so much of this is new to me.