Do moderators have the power to close comment sections? Maybe when a blog is promoted to an article, you could close the comments in the blog version.
I like the idea of this site too. I do see potential for it becoming overwhelming to keep up with though. I like that there are icons that indicate which threads have unread comments, but there are two issues that I'm hoping have easy work-arounds. First, the icon on a thread doesn't change from "Unread" to "Read" when you click the back button - you must click the What's new button to refresh, which means scrolling back up through the page of comments. I discovered the Top button to circumvent the scrolling, and that helps, but if there's an even better solution, that would be cool. Second, it would be great if I could ignore a thread or at least mark it as read if I can tell by the title that I'm not interested in the discussion.