I'd have to say I agree with 010577 here. Any forum I've been to, I've always thought that having 'hot' topics is silly. If you can't tell how busy a topic is, well, probably you don't visit the forums enough to care. I hate having ten b'zillion little icons representing all different things, so that everyone is forced to check a legend at the bottom of the screen to decipher what icon means what. As far as I'm concerned, the best system consists of read, unread, and locked.