Maybe this is only relevant at a time of high activity like this,but:

Suggested feature: Alternate list view of forum threads which sorts by the compound key (NEW, updatetime).
(if you don't know what a compound key is: this would result in getting all of the NEW posts at the front, sorted by update time, followed by all the non-NEW posts, sorted by update time)

Alternative idea: Unpaginated view showing the newest .. 100, say, of posts which have the status NEW.
May be less preferable since 'stickies' don't fit in here quite as naturally.

Rationale: NEW status is often going to be more relevant than update time. If you're participating in a topic, finding out what is new is often more important than exactly *how* new it is. This comes into conflict with the chronological sorting once there is more than one page containing 'NEW' posts[2].

[1] ie. posts that have the NEW marker, not posts that are chronologically the most recent.

[2] Thus you can have a situation where none of the items on page 1 say 'NEW', but the Forum text is still italicized, indicating new posts are present in the forum overall, which could be in a number of pages depending on how often you visit. Naturally it would be convenient at this point to have a way to just pull them all to the front (or to simply start out with that kind of view)