Another music forum I'm part of has both these features, which I agree are very nice!
A while back I asked the MusicBanter administrator, Yac, if MusicBanter could add a playlist option for profiles (so it is easier to learn about each other's favorite music and actually hear it), and also include more private message storage, a proper MB chatroom, notification of friendship requests/private messages, and a color personalization option for the site.
I said I felt that activating these additional functions would make MusicBanter even more user-friendly, increasing the number of people who are active members here and encouraging more page views at the site, since any function that encourages friendships to form probably increases the number of visits the site gets per day.
I also told Yac how pleased people are that "gay" is no longer censored, since part of gay pride is using the word gay with pride, and so allowing people to type the word "gay" makes the community more inclusive.
Yac replied right away, and I found out that the site's it team has been given the list of improvement suggestions from MusicBanter's moderators, as well as my list, and so we are just waiting to see if or when the site's it team will make changes. Yac explained that the it team is pretty swamped with work. They must have to attend to a lot of different sites?