It is highly ironic that they guy who wrote this block does not see forum posts. If his block were available for this forum, he could easily see any new posts about his work at a glance.
Our students do everything on Facebook because it has this kind of functionality. It makes online conversations easy. Moodle forums need this because it gives them a bit of the functionality of Facebook. Please put this into the core so that my administrators will install it at my school. Thanks.