It's kind of hard right now to know when there's new stuff going on here.

In a sense I want to keep it that way—this is meant to be a lot slower than a chatroom or a social media feed. But if you're interested in staying up to date on things that are going on in here, I want you to be able to do that.

Right now it's pretty easy because things are slow and there hasn't really been more than one active conversation at any given time. And because it's just a website, you can use the regular tools for keeping tabs on regular websites, like bookmarking a particular topic and checking up on it now and then.

A couple options for more powerful tools are:

• An activity feed. I will admit (gasp!) that I have an admin-only view that shows me every message across all threads and boards in reverse-chronological order. I check this frequently and it's very useful but I don't think I want to expose it. It's more like a moderation tool, so that nothing is getting past me that I ought to know about. For casual participants, I think it sort of breaks the ethos. I want it to always be possible for new people to stumble into (or back into) a conversation, but I want that stumbling to be a little bit organic.
• Opt-in email notifications for new activity. Similar to the above but a little less fast—maybe you find out about new stuff every 24 hours. Keeps some of the serendipity in place, but still perhaps too powerful ("power" as in "power user"). Also I want to avoid having to send emails for as long as possible because technically it's a whole thing.
• Read/unread status on a per-thread basis. I just added a little more info to the boards that shows how many messages a thread has, who last wrote to it, and when they did that. I think this helps a lot in finding out whether there's something new to read, provided you remember the last thing you saw in the thread. I could ease the burden of having to remember, but some of the UX and logic here gets complicated. I also don't love the noise of adding some kind of unread status to the boards—it seems kind of stressful.
• Opt-in thread subscriptions. Maybe some of that real-time-ish notification stuff can be exposed to you just for the threads you've participated in? This encourages participation but also I've seen features like this abused with tons of "commenting to follow!" messages that offer no other substance. Maybe this is fine?

I'm not leaning toward any particular strategy here but I'm curious what you think. Please share your thoughts…hopefully I see them!