Simple Thumbs On Forum Index

[Bones_3DFC]

One guy, quote: wanted 90% gallery and 10% forum.
Well, I'm more 90% forum and 10% gallery.

Perhaps there is a way to pull the newest thumbs directly from the thumbs directory. Thumbs which were auto-generated when files were attached, that is.

I don't need a gallery at all, really. I just want to be able to place the say, 3 latest uploaded thumbs on forum index.
I want to pull them only from specific boards, really. But even that isn't too important.
I'll go buy vBadvanced right now if I'm guaranteed it has the ability to only pull thumbs from specific boards.
But I don't want to have to create gallery boards for the thumbs to be pulled from. I just want the already-generated thumbs, from attachments, from specific boards to be displayed on forum index.

I don't want my users to have a "two-step" process.
One person uploads an attachment to a thread and the next person comes along, chit-chats and then does the same. The forum itself already is a gallery.
So I don't want to upload to a gallery, say coppermine and then go back to a specific board and re-upload it in the forum environment. Or have to link to it.
Besides, members have links to all their images from their own profiles, already.
I'm new to vBulletin - maybe I even have a setting to allow other users to view others' entire profile stock of images.
But that's not the point.
The point is: you get to the forum index, you notice someone has been busy working on an image because a new thumb is up, you jump into the thread and then you get to work on an image yourself. Then you go back to the thread, you upload your image and that image becomes the next image on the forum index.

I don't even want usernames or titles or locations or any kind of text associated with each thumb. Possibly the thumbs could link to the larger image (which seems on cue as the thumbs in the threads pop up a new window for the larger image).

I don't know if I'm making sense.
For an almost perfect example: http://www.spinquad.com/forums
See the four, perfect thumbs at the top of the forum index?
I don't know if that's a big secret or what. It seems to be some kind of "Spotlight" hack.
I don't know the inner-workings of the hack. But even if I as the administrator had to "ok" each image into a queue or something, that would work fine.
Those four, beautiful images at Spinquad are the reason I purchased vBulletin.
I figured it was some kind of standard hack or feature. And the thumbs are only coming out of specific boards - namely the boards at which users upload images.

I've spent hours and days - I've even managed to load up coppermine and bridge it to my 3.5 VB if you can believe that. But I don't see how coppermine
can be of use, given my needs.

I'm brand-spanking new to vBulletin. Maybe someone who's been around the block can tell me how to better use coppermine - or how they do it at spinquad - or if vBadvanced can possibly be cut-down to bare-Bones and simply display thumbs on forum index for me - or is there hope for a new hack.

I'm starting to think I'll have to learn some coding. Then, in a year or two, I could do it myself