When looking through topics in a forum, it would be helpful if the date of the last post was included in the heading line, ie:
SUBJECT AUTHOR REPLIES VIEWS LAST POSTER DATE OF LAST POST
This would help in finding and focusing on more recent activity.
As a further suggestion, could a filter be added so that older messages (and some are very old!) would not be shown, for example “Show only messages within the last 3 months”.