If you’re running a huge course, the Unanswered Discussion block is a great way to keep tabs on any threads or questions that have not been answered within the forum.  Straight forward and handy; you can even exclude specific forums to cut down to only the most important discussions (i.e. omit the “social” forum for a course).

This block was created/contributed by Michael de Raadt and is available in the plugins repository: http://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=block_unanswered_discussions