(...) Taking this into consideration, PowerGlove, how feasible is it to patch this ignore topic button but with the "last post [date] by [username]" still visible? I think it'll be quite signaling enough whether we should reinvest our attention into the ignored topic or not if we glanced at the author of latest reply.
I'll consider this more deeply when I get around to actually implementing it, but my knee-jerk is that that won't work out very well.
What would suit
me best (as a user) is for the topic to become totally invisible once I've ignored it. I agree though that there should be some mechanism to take a peek at ignored threads every once in a while to make sure that you're not missing out on anything important. I think maybe a "show ignored" toggle-link (in the same strip as "new topic") that adds/removes ";showIgnored" to the board URL would probably work out nicely.