Deprecated - Social software and communities

I'm looking to migrate to Drupal from Joomla, and I was hoping to get a little insight. While perusing the forums I ran into a site called Terminus and was impressed on what could be achieved in Drupal, one of the primary reasons for the jump, even though Joomla offers out of the box solutions for a social network site, I have yet to see a comparable site done in Joomla/CB.

Please excuse me if I posted to the wrong group. Please tell me which group would be better.
Also, please excuse my stupidity at not knowing how to do the following. I need help and guidance.

This is to be a very socially important web site and a high traffic site.

My son needs a web site to organize all the volunteers of a raise awareness of the plight of Darfur. He has the 400,000 faces, now needs to control 200+ social action volunteers. I am helping setup a Drupal site, but we can't get it to work correctly. Staged at solving-software.com/s4d

The volunteers need to be a heirarchy of admins, rep captains, Reps, rep helpers, registered users and anonymous.
When visitors sign up on the site, they need select regular, rep or rep helper (rep captains and admins are assigned).
Regular member should not be asked nor answer all the contact info on the registration form.
Reps need to provide location (gmap etc.) and they get approved by and assigned to one Rep Captain. They get a special approval email telling them how to create a group and forum (wish I could do them automagically for new rep).
Rep Helpers need fill in their location info. Then to be assigned/join the nearest geographically closest school's rep, group, forum and team. Only that nearest rep should get the request to join email (not all 200+ reps)

We are trying to build an intranet community site here for a K-12 school and running into a few problems and being somewhat new to drupal I cannot figure out how to solve some problems. I have a vague idea but cannot quite connect the dots. So I would appreciate any help other drupalers can offer.

Here is what we are working with and trying to achieve:
Basically We Have the following categories: Devisions(Upper, Middle, Lower), Departments (Math, Science, Etc.), Grades (K-12), plus misc categories...
There is some content that belongs to all categories, some only to devisions, some is limited to certain grade and department.
k-4 teachers have a set of pages with information and a newspaper which is essentially a blog.
5-12 have departmental blogs. Department Pages which pull in all the information from Department Member Blogs and pages as well as list department members in particular division .

So if I go to the Middle school page, I will see the latest blog posts from all middle school teachers, as well as a list of Middle School teachers under departments to which they belong. Plus Resources/Downloads that belong specifically to middle school.

If I am on the main page of the site I would see the list of all the latest posts from all over school.

Not sure if this is the best place for this - feel free to move it if necessary.

While reading a diary by Maryscott O'Connor on DailyKos about the recent changes to his blogroll (yes, she got bumped), I had a flash of inspiration (might want to stand back a bit, there, these things are dangerous) and came up with the idea of an automated community blogroll. Basically, every time someone posts a link in a blog entry, the module would snag the domain name and add it to the database or if it already exists, add points to its entry. As more people linked to it, it'd climb up the list and appear in a larger font (like tag lists on some sites), thus gaining in prominence.

That'd be a truly democratic and merit-based way to handle a blogroll. Those who post the best content get linked to more often and thus climb up the list. Also, if you wanted, posts could be weighted by user role, so a site linked by the site admin would get 3 points, a regular front-pager would rate 2 points, and a regular user would get 1 point. Other useful features would be the ability to manually add certain blogs and sticky those to the top of the list (say, the admin's favorite sites), and the ability to exclude a list of sites (major news sites, image hosting sites, blogs that have been banned for spamming, etc.).

Good afternoon all.

I am working on a multi-site Durpal project where the client creates a new site quite often. I am planning on creating an administrative module to provide a quick and easy way of cloning sites under a multi-site Drupal setup, and in a user-friendly manner. I have provided a list of possibilities and specifications below to give a better idea of what this suggests.

I wish for users to click on a video input link (in my navigation block) which opens a standard form (which is on one db node) where they input a title, description, key words, and the embedded object data for video. I want this form's action to be that of another node on the site - where the video can be seen. Can I do this on Drupal as I would on a standard html document in a file server directory?