Design suggestions - 1241702

I can see that the new GRACE is a major undertaking involving a lot of work, but just wanted to offer some suggestions from a user's point of view.
- In general, I think the pages feel a bit cluttered and hard to navigate. In particular, I am not sure it is worth distinguishing, on the right-hand-side of the page, between "new forum topics" and "new forum replies", as these are essentially the same thing. To have both takes up space and risks a lot of repetition. If this doubling up were scrapped, there'd be more room for recent comments from different forums.
- Some "Comments" (on faculty posts) from the old, frozen site are appearing - are these just as "fillers"? It is quite misleading as it suggests these threads or comments are still active (for eg I've just come across a comment from Regina on a 2009 post of Dr West's).
- I know it is a web convention to be fixated on time (posted ten minutes ago, an hour ago and so on), but I wonder if this "freshness" is overemphasised in the new version. On GRACE, which already operates in a number of different time zones, the question of when something was posted is far less important than who posted it, what it's about and whether you've already read it. It would be great to have a function, as on the old site, that labelled posts as unread or new. To me this is far more important than how long ago they were posted. I was probably in bed at the time :)
Many thanks, and I hope feedback is acceptable in the context of everyone's hard work, which is much appreciated.