This comes out of my experience as a teaching assistant. It would be nice to restrict a forum to a specific time period (like an assignment), where students must have their posts and/or replies online by a certain time, and after that time they are told that they can no longer post.

Also, it would be nice to have a grading feature in forums that is not dependent on ratings from students, maybe a feature that allows the instructor to give each student a grade for the overall discussion (like a participation grade) that would connect directly with the grade book.