I'd like to thank Simmo! for the suggestion he made (in the thread www.gpwa.org/forum/gpwa-forum-suggestion-173965.html). We implemented the suggested feature earlier today.
Now, if you mouse over the title of a thread, you will see the first 150 characters of the first post in the thread. I agree with Summo! that this is very useful - by providing a preview to the thread it makes it a little easier to decide whether to click through to view the thread itself.
We've also made a few other changes this past week that are more behind the scenes. We've upgraded to vbSEO version 3.1. Besides some improvements in search engine optimization for the forums, the new version performs better, so the forums should be a little snappier. Also, the new version enabled us to legitimately remove the little vbSEO footer from the bottom of every page in the forums.
Finally, we've implemented a sitemap for the forums that should help webmasters using google and other search engines more easily find the information in the public pages of our forums.
Michael