So this is more of a suggestion than a question, but I'm not sure of any other way to push the idea to the PM webdevs.
Since the forums contain the concept of replies, but every comment is inline in a sequence, the context of conversation is blurred in the sequence of comments. You can click the parent message which a reply is addressed to to follow it backwards, but in a navigating that is a horror show. Additionally, the page containing content being read will change based on the position in the sequence if you have it sorted newest to oldest, so a simple refresh can cause you to be viewing a page that's umpteen comments newer than when you left it. At least, that appears to be the behaviour as I've observed it.
If I could make the suggestion:
1) instead of indexing which page is user is on, track current position as the index of the first comment on a given page, and infer which page someone is on based on that.
2) Make comments dynamically load based on scroll position (like a feed), indent all replies, and default all replies to a comment to a collapsed view. This way people can elect to keep reading replies by following down the thread, or stay closer to the context of the conversation by reading all sibling replies. This intrinsically handles the issue of lines of conversation going off-topic by encapsulating them in a way that's easily skipped over, and helps eliminate the need for moderation.
