I apologize if I for some reason have overlooked this feature but:
I have for a while now been using a news aggregator. It is a tool that checks for posts on various channels which are feed though a standard XML page. These feeds are called RSS feeds. Here are a few examples:
http://www.fightaging.org/index.xml
http://www.mprize.org/blogs/index.rdf
http://www.mprize.or...feed&category=2
http://www.healthext...n.net/index.rdf
http://longevityfirst.org/index.rdf
http://www.betterhum...onze/index.aspx
Well, I think you get the point.
My suggestion is to make a similar feed of new posts in the ImmInst forums. As it is now I can get a list of active topics, but that requires me to have a browser open and refresh that browser once in a while. The aggregator software makes those checks for me and notifies me when new entries has been made.
In addition to the active posts lists I am really missing a list of all recent posts so I can see how active a topic is and who is making contributions. That way I can pinpoint a specific entry when I want to and still have an overview of the activity on ImmInst. Needless to say, I am hitting the refresh button quite often on the "Active Topics" page.
So, what do you think?