I had typed up a real thorough response and then somehow I managed to misplace that window.
squidrabies & HCRoyall: That space will probably get used for that purpose. That was why I changed the way the inbox notification worked. But what if it says "10 new comic comments" and all the comments are on different comics -- when you click on the notification, where should the site take the user? Seems like they'd be expecting to see all the comments.
Spankling: Those are good ideas, but I have some technical nitpicks. New post tracking would be cool, but it's rough to implement on potentially thousands of items. The forums work by storing the time and date you last visited each forum in the user's browser. It's not a big deal because there are only 10-15 forums max. But if I had to store the last time users visited any of their comics, I'd run out of room as there's a pretty small limit to how much websites can store in browsers.
Showing the list in order of most recently commented is something I've been trying to get to work, but it's slow and a resource hog, especially on users who have tons of comics. It's probably not impossible, but it's definitely proving to be a pretty big challenge.
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