Short answer: No
Longer more explanatory answer:
There is no option for this in your user settings. Could we custom code it? there is a high certainty that we could indeed have our resident codemonkeys hack the forum code to allow this behavior. But unfortunately their time is a limited resource and they don't work for peanuts (they work for bananas) and this modification would require recoding /re-installation /re troubleshooting whenever we had an update, upgrade or possibly even a template change.
If we were to make this a global default by digging around in the forum code it would be "easier and cheaper" but severely degrade the performance of ECF.. so it is not something we would consider doing.
Unfortunately this is one of the situations where though it would be awesome to provide the functionality, it just isn't a viable change for the forums functionality unless some core coding of VB changes in a manner that would support this request.