Discussion thread previews and thread order by

I have about 10 forums (thread containers), and I am always going into each to see which ones are “most active” (I will define “most active” in a minute). What I mean is, I have to:
a) click the forum tab
b) click the forum I am interested in
c) scroll to see the “most active”

Thats more activity than need be just to see what I want. I am proposing to reduce this in the following explanation, but first let me explain my definition of “most active”. “Most active” can mean most viewed, most posted, or a combination of the two. Ok.

When I click on the Discussion tab I would want to see a few new things:
1) The name of each Forum (discussion container), and below or on the side the top X titles of threads (a thread title preview) ordered by a choice of: initial post date, last post date, most active views, most active posts, most active views and posts.
2) an “order by” dropdown menu either on the top of the Discussions page or next to each individual discussion with a choice of: initial post date, last post date, most active views, most active posts, most active views and posts.

In sum, I am looking for a limited preview of the threads in a forum, ordered in some useful manner, for the purpose of not having to do excessive clicks etc