Someone (I can’t remember who) asked if the subscribe to comments feature, which will send you an e-mail alert on future comments, could provide a link to the specific comment, rather than the comment section as a whole. This was never a problem in the past, because I didn’t have threaded comments enabled, but now we do, and that makes finding the new comment more difficult.
The plugin I use does not have many options, but it was fairly easy to find and make the change in the PHP code. That plugin hasn’t been updated for years, so hopefully I’ll remember I made a change if it ever does. Either way, the e-mail will now link directly to the new comment.
I have always preferred to put the comments into an RSS feed, myself. While it does take a moment to clean out feeds when I’m done with the conversation, I prefer that over getting emails all the time for conversations.
I’ve always wanted a “get comments to this discussion without commenting” feature. There are discussions I’m interested in following where I don’t yet or may never have something useful to add where this would be very nice.
I’m in the habit of receiving comments via email; left over from the days when my email was a great deal more portable than my RSS reader. Now that Google Reader is my RSS manager of choice, I may need to rethinkt hat. OTOH, I check email rather more often than RSS