I am not sure that this is even feasible on these blogs, but I know how I would like to see comments (as a casual reader). I imagine a bulletin board style layout. At the top are a few links which look like
“Taking John’s idea from comment 10 further (59 comments)”
“Taking Dan’s idea from comment 19 further (30 comments)”
“Continuing on the ideas of comments 11-15 (100 comments)”
Below these links is the original discussion of the problem. People could continue to post observations which are disjoint from all the above links, such as fresh ideas, new approaches, and observations which apply across the board.
Clicking on “Taking John’s idea from comment 10 further” would lead to another page with the same layout. Again at the top we read “Taking X’s idea from comment n further” and below these links we see the discussion, but this time the discussion is only concerned with John’s idea. You get the idea.

To achieve such organization, perhaps those who are working full time on the project (or whoever has agreed to occasionally summarize the findings) could create these links and then be the first to post on the newly created page with their summary.

I am no expert on manipulating blogs so I understand that this may not be as easy as I’ve made it sound. But this sort of layout would be most pleasing to the eye of the casual reader who may just want to work on the most popular attempts (gauged by the number of comments next to each link). And it also allows more organization in the comments since we get to see the relative depth of the observation based on how many clicks into the thread we are.

Additionally, we’ve already discussed the importance of allowing mistakes and errors; the original screed from Dr. Gowers was to allow half-formed ideas, but I fear if people can start to get rated down that we will get less experimentation.

Finally if there’s some sort of filter code to only view comments over a certain threshold, I fear it could make things more rather than less confusing, because often key insights have only made sense in the context of the (more minor) comments that preceded them.

(I’ve found that it doesn’t always seem to take effect, though. I assume that’s probably some type of caching issue, and will disappear.)

Edit: I see what’s going on. It’s displaying correctly in a kind of preview mode available to admins. But apparently we have to purchase the ability to modify the CSS, for general use. I’ll look into it.