When we start out as a Joomla! developer, it is often much easier, and takes a lot less time, to edit an existing extension that does most of what we want than it is to create a completely new one. So, we will find some extensions that almost fit what we want to do, and then modify them to fill the gaps.
Even though this is outside of our goals list, we want to put up some simple modules to fill up the site with interesting information. Since, we want to encourage people to participate in the forum, it might be worth putting in some modules that show our top posters and rewarding them with having their name up on the site.
Looking around on the JED, we can find a recent threads module, but there is no top posters module for Joo!BB. There is, however, one for Fireboard, another popular Joomla! Forum component, called Fireboard Top 10 Active 10. So we will take that one, and modify it to use Joo!BB, and just show the top 10 posters instead.