This is a huge obstacle to custom communities. This is a rather good solution, it seems. Have Blizz write a proprietary software for this, host it themselves, and make it a service you pay for. They've been looking to monetize Bnet, and this seems like a great optional way to do this.

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Q u o t e:
Hi,
I am longterm warcraft and oldschool starcraft gamer. One thing i really loved in warcraft were the custom games, like dota, tides of blood etc.
In fact, after some years of playing warcraft, i only seldomly played ladder games and used to play custom games only. And I know that many, many people did the same! I think currently dota is even more popular in general than ladder games (just a guess).

One thing which really, really bothered me all the time was the unability to host games.
I have a router with which it is not possible to host games. Seriously, i tried everything, i used every tutorial how to host, including opening ports etc. But well, like i said, with my router I just didnt have the ability to host games. This was really a technical problem, not some kind of dumbness ( i think so at least-> Spent many hours searching for solutions without access-> Normal methods didnt work).

I paused now for one year, so I dont know, whether there are softwares to host games even if you usually cant host games, but i think the risk of getting malware by downloading some random software from the net is present.

So... well.... back to topic. In my last years, not only me was unable to host games, it seemed like 80% of people were unable to host, or too lazy to read the tutorials or whatever. But well, like i said: 80% of people were unable to host. This led to the following peculiar situation:

My favorite custom game in WC3 was tides of blood:
There were always only about 50 core players, but the arranged privat games(we called them inhouse games) were just great. Everyone was skilled (pro so to say) etc. This was really the best gaming experience in my life... and i ve played wow too :P... But nothing beats Tides of Blood. Anyways...
The major problem! There were only like 5 people able to host games.

I remember full channels, up to 20 people eagerly waiting for a host, and noone in fact beeing able to host. I really remember waiting for hours. It was really really frustrating.20 Players! We could have played 3-4 games in the time we were waiting. And when someone finally arrived, 15 of the 20 players were afk, cause they already waited so long....I hated those situation.

So it was really frustrating.
Now one year later, i logged in into WC3 again. I played a bit dota and joined a dota clan.
But it struck me. The same problem. 10 people sitting in the channel, everyone willing to play a game, but noone able to host a game! Is there anything more anoying!?

I dont know whether this would be hard to implement, but i really would love that everybody would have the ability to host games. And if this is technically not possible, that at least Blizzard offers "hosting"-Bots that we could avoid the "router" problem by just letting the bots host games for us.

Ok, hope you all got my point!
This is really the number one thing on my wishlist for SC2

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Hmm, did you already ask at our Technical Support forum on this problem, since there are quite similar questions there about the problem with router and firewall?