I'm not sure if this is just an issue on forum.mt.org or it's in the default community forum teamplates but the home page here is not great.

The "most recent topics" is next to useless, when you have the "recently active topics" available also, a longer list of "recently active" and ditch the most recent one would be best (assuming that would essentially merge the two lists).

Secondly, the "questions needing an answer" is a brilliant idea, but it needs an ordering scheme. At the moment the order is completely random, so when I look at it to see if there is anything new I can answer I have to scan the whole list to make sure I'm not missing something. If it was in order of oldest at the top to newest at the bottom then someone coming into it new can look for to answer questions that have been passed over by other people, but regular viewers can just skip to the bottom to see if there is anything new they can help with.

The topic list I suggested first here should also have a "More" link, at the moment it is very hard to keep up if you are following more than one discussion.

The option to subscribe to a topic via email would be handy (and this could feed back into the core of MT so that commenters can subscribe to comments on their favourite posts)

The recent activity feeds for each user could really do with matching what is displayed on their profile page, as it is new topics contain the title in the rss title and replies contain the body as the rss title. This would be another great thing to feed into an actionstream you see! (I guess I could do a scraper... hmm I might just do that!)

All of these ideas are based around making it easier for regulars to keep up with more than one thread at a time. I've been trying to do that now for a few weeks and it can get quite hard, is time consuming and it's very easy to miss something.