take a look at http://www.avsforum.com/f/

If you are on one of their forum threads and someone makes a new post it puts a little notification on the bottom right showing you how many new and/or unread posts there are in that thread along with thread page navigation. If you click on that it will take you to the first new/unread post.

I am not sure if you are going to redo this forum structure but this would be a pretty nice feature to have especially with threads such as game threads.

Just an idea...