To be honest, I like to participate in group builds, but can't stand to follow the threads for dozens of pages. For every work-in-progress post with a photo there are a dozen "good job" posts. Miss a couple days without visiting the thread and a five page thread jumps to 15 pages. If you jump to the last page, you may miss many photos of great work, but if you click through each page, 90% end up being just "good job" posts.
I think you can subscribe to a particular thread to follow it and take you right to that post though.