Just a suggestion here. Maybe you can include a "Last post by $username" in every thread to see wthe username of the one who did the last post.
I think we would like to have more control of the forums. Eg, we should be choose the threads to follow up on , instead of automatically adding them to My Topics. Now i have alot of threads in My Topics. Some of them i don't want to follow up anymore but i can't delete them.
Just to add on, probably we can see the number of unread messages beside My Mailbox when we log in also