Thank you for your suggestions!!
That first idea sounds promising - setting up a user with our ticketing email address to watch first posts. I was also looking into the API options as a possibility but I don’t know enough about them to determine if that’s a plausible solution. I looked into the plugins options, and it looks like the Zendesk plugin has the functionality we’re looking for, but we don’t currently use Zendesk.
We generally don’t have a lot of activity on our forum, so we are not able to monitor it closely and have been relying on the notifications to keep up with new posts or replies, but that has been inconsistent thus far. Hopefully we’ll figure something out soon! 