Thread filtering and new / today's posts

Hello all,
I have a few questions / feature requests about how this forum works. I may be overlooking something, and hope I’m not asking too much.
I visit the site every day and try to keep up with what’s happening and how everyone else is doing things, if I see a topic that either looks interesting or that I may be able to help with I read it and respond appropriately.
However the new posts and today’s posts do not match up. Many days especially at the beginning of term I don’t have time until I am at home to read. So I expect not being on the site all day the today’s posts and new posts should be about the same. Don’t get me wrong I access the site at work if I have an issue but can’t justify casually reading it while we are so busy.
Here are my questions;
Can someone explain the difference between the what’s new and today’s posts?
Can I filter the today’s posts to exclude certain forums or tags? We do not use SIMS here so filtering those posts out would help.
Following the idea of filtering the new / today’s posts, can I filter out certain threads? Sometimes I see the same thread day after day because it is a hot topic or ongoing issue but does not apply to me.
There are some forums that have multiple thread types, discussion and question. When I have the time I like to search for unanswered questions and see who I can help. Can we get a feature like this?

Thank you,

Hi
Sorry for the delay replying to this, didnt spot it funnily enough.
Whats New/New Posts are the same thing, basically that page shows any new threads or posts since you last visited and subsequently timed out, this list is dynamic.
Today's Posts show posts from the last 24 hours, the is fixed and the time when you last visited has no effect.
Hope that makes sense.

Regarding filtering, there is no way to do this currently, not sure if it would be possible or not although unanswered posts could possibly be given its own link/page.