You know, in theory it wouldn't actually be the hardest thing in the world to make a script that runs locally on the users machine and scrapes the PMs page, looking for the string unread or any similar match. Say every few minutes or so, just to prevent spam. The caveat would be that you would show as online all the dam time, and also that things like the new posts link in active topics would probably break because it would assume you're always logging in. And speaking of logins, that might be it's own problem, unless you could figure out how to send raw login data and then go ahead with the scraping.

Sigh. I mean, seriously, why is it so hard to check your pms once in a while? I know the forum doesn't notice you if there's something you haven't read yet, but it's really not that hard to click on that damn private messages link and check.

We all wish better could be done, but for the time being this is what we have. The administrators are in the process of transfering over the forum so hopefully this will come to an end very shortly. In the meanwhile, what's the issue with hitting H on topics like these? They'll fall to the bottom of the page in a few days anyway.

@8, well, it's not harming you, people can't be bothered to check their pm box every time they log in, and there is no better system yet. Until you come up with a better solution, quit your bitching.

Sage, why not? Why is a plus one click so hard to do? I never understood the lazyness of some people nowadays. Yes, it's definitely true that we need a better system, as I've mentioned above. But until we don't have one, we must stick to what we have and we must adapt to the situation. This is almost like when a game is not fully accessible and people start bitching about how shitty it is, OMG I'm never going to play this one because I need to OCR omgomgomg I hate OCR soooo much OMG ocr is evil. It's almost the same situation and I never understood this mentality.