I have sort of no basic for making suggestions since I contribute nothing to this site and haven’t used it enough to know all features, but that won’t stop me.
1) Is there a way to identify trending Topics? Like an algorithm of #likes x #posts in topic x forum constant (like 0.5 to drop BYU/TDS posts).
2) Would it be possible to merge some of the views onto the home page? I think everyone views message boards differently and having a few of the more popular options right on the home page (sort of a sampler) would allow the first time visitor to find his/her preference immediately. For instance, I would love something like this index home page that has forum sticky topics, then a section for most recently started topics, then a section for the trending/active topics, then a section from the Hub/member activity/comments with the ability to “load more” for each section. Also, if each index section had a similarly built homepage, being able to easily toggle between the different indexes would be great.