I gave up on reading Usenet new 20 years ago as all newsreaders assumed the every message posted was of equal interest to me and that I had tell it not to display a thread if I didn't want to see it. Given the vast deluge of threads, though, this proved unwieldy.

I find all forum software follows the same illogic.

My personal preference is for forum software to allow me to select which forums I want to follow and ignore the rest. For example in the e-book readers section I would like only the Kobo section to appear. I don't have an iRex, or whatever it's called, any I probably never will so why should that forum always appear? Any forum I don't want to see I'd like to turn off.

Within the list of threads in a forum I would like only the following threads to appear:

1) new threads created since my last visit
2) threads that I subscribe to. I would no longer have to manually block a thread from appearing because it by default won't on my next visit.

That's it. Easy. Information I would like to have and only the information I would like to have.