[quote] Fortunately, in the meantime, the sidebar usually seems to have 1 check and roleplay from each of the Free/Casual/Advanced sections when I glance at it.[/quote]
If it makes a difference, then I managed to spot five intChecks and five newest RPs being all in casual for several hours in the run during the day (or what constitutes for a day for me). It is actually part of why I brought the suggestion up to begin with. :-P

[quote] Also, one nice thing about subforums is that they can foster their own subcommunities/atmospheres. Clicking into the Nation or Tabletop Roleplay forum is much different than just clicking a "Nation" or "Tabletop" tag filter. I will have to think about what this means for the tag system and how I can possibly preserve the phenomenon with tags.[/quote]
I consider the "creating its own subculture" a bit of a problem rather than advantage, to be honest ... pack-mentality of smaller communities and all that. Furthermore, as I am predominantly an advanced player, I've somehow found myself completely excluded from the NRP scene of RPG ever since it got its own subforum ... which is bizarre, considering that across all sites, well over half of the RPs I've joined have been NRPs this past year. 

Oh, and what about the quote/quotemention matter (as right now, the only way to make "normal" quotes is to remove the '@' by hand or type the name in manually)? I'd rather avoid sending unnecessary mentions, since with threads that will be browsed by the person anyway, it just means they will have to separately go to the alert tab to dismiss the alert.