PlanetsCentral

First the symbol is a (dark) blue fringe of the balloon on a (slightly darker) blue background. I did not notice it until right now, and its still kind of hidden even if I look right on the spot. May be another color, say a dark green may be more convenient.

That's probably more a matter of taste because I consider the forum icons one of the better-looking part of the site :-) But its entirely possible that the visibility depends on your monitor. I'm not sure whether adding more colors would work; I don't want this to look like an angry fruit salad.

I originally tried using different colors for the balloons (yellow vs. white). This is how other forum skins solve it (e.g. at CircusMaximus). However, personally I found that confusing because I never know which are the new ones.

I'll try whether I can make the glows asymmetric, maybe that catches the eye.

Second the fringe stays until I read each and every thing I did not read so far. Even if it's 3 months old stuff I am obviously (cause I did not care in 3 months) not interested in. So may be there is a way to only mark threads as not read when they are in some way up to date (3 days, a week, half month, something like that). Well it's probably something less important until the forum grows a bit and becomes more crowded.

I plan to expire the unread markers someday, but more with the intention of saving database memory. The user feature is the "mark this forum read" button.

--Stefan

Big ones for comparison: