Okay, this is something that's bugged me for a little while but I never bothered asking about. What's with the big blue dots on the left side of the forums? What I mean is why are some blue and others not? And it's always the same ones that are blue because at first I just thought it was whichever forums had the most members. Any real reason or did someone just decide the site looked better with them?

I'm fairly sure it has to do with when the last post was made in the thread... but as to the time limit for the dot to appear, I'm not sure.

I think you are quite right, because I just looked through and those were all the latest posts. 3 minutes to answer a question that's bugged me for a little while maybe I should of thought of the more obvious possible reasons

There is a key at the bottom of the page.

 

Big blue dot means: Forum Contains New Posts

Non-blue but equally big dot means: Forum Contains No New Posts

 

Just because you're a genius doesn't mean you can skip reading the directions, Ducky. Look what happened to Wile E. Coyote.

I figured it out... it's not a time limit thing. It has to do with your cookies, the browser knows when you've visited a thread, so the non-blue dot image loads instead.