RIght now individual forum pages will show who is browsing the forum at the bottom, but that's not actually useful at all

I think it would be neat if you could see who is viewing a thread, from the forum list, before clicking it. Maybe a tiny grid of avatars near the pagination?

We should also get rid of the current "hot thread" metric (which we don't do anything with anyway, I don't think it even affects the styling of the thread icons) and instead apply "hot" styling to threads which currently have 5+ users browsing them.

makes sense to me

+1

makes much more sense