I finally decided to move them.
With the growth of the site, showing the four most recent comments at the top grew less and less valuable, so I moved the pod down into the right sidebar. To help ease your pain, I increased the count to seven, and I also added a "MORE" link at the bottom of the pod to view all recent comments.
Every visitor can see the page displaying all recent comments, but you must be logged-in to the site to see the pod showing seven most recent comments on the sidebar. This queury is kind of expensive to make on every page load, so this is a way of rewarding those with accounts and hopefully keeping our server online if the NCAA ever decides to smack Ohio State again.
If you have any questions or other feedback, I'd love to hear from you.
ack. its a pretty small deal, but i did like them up top. with so much going on (posts, blog posts, forum) it was nice to know where the comments were going and which topics were 'hot'