Alicornutopia

But "is the third cell" is the wrong model to use here, because (in your example) the fourth-by-counting cell is indisputably in column six.

The underlying model is that cells can span multiple columns and rows. The way that is written down in a linear sequence of markup happens to be necessarily asymmetric.

It doesn't seem particularly productive to say that my model is wrong? It is in fact the fourth cell, but it's after two cells of span 1 and one of span 3, and so it ends up being in the sixth column. I haven't looked at the spec for how frowned upon it would be to lay out a table as described, so I don't know if it just looks ugly to me and is actually totally syntactically valid, or if there would be issues if it were parsed by various systems that perhaps read down columns, and I'm not going to look that up right now because it's too late.

According to the spec, a cell is always anchored at the top left, but this doesn’t seem to mean much and otherwise all slots a cell covers are treated equally. Semantically, cells have specific headers associated with them, but you can choose those manually with the headers attribute.

I’m not sure combining the cells is a good idea, though. It seems like it would look odd for the user, regardless of what the underlying code was.

What about moving the icon to be in the column with the warning and status icons? That would have different tradeoffs.

I feel like moving the icon to be in the column with warning and status would be bad.

I agree that it would be bad, and at minimum would require that it be on the next line. On the bright side the other buttons there are not clickable and do missing the hitbox won't go to the wrong page.

Creating a new column for it feels weird but might be the preferable solution?

New column does seem like it works.

Are people okay with the starrydark arrows (for 'go to last post' on tags owed)? If so I can implement them.

I also feel like a polling system could be useful, so I can check for community consensus instead of just having to guess if people don't care / agree with the latest post / don't like it but don't want to have to post, etc.

Look good to me. I just got overwhelmed by all of the column discussion which is way over my head. :P

When I save a draft, I am taken to the top of the last page. I want to be taken to the bottom of the last page instead, as that's where the reply form lives and where I am about to continue typing my reply. How hard would it be to make that happen?