Not sure how viable a solution this would be, but there could be a post along the lines of "comment here once your fic is posted" because the timestamp on comments can't be changed. Though then that brings up the issue of different time zones so I guess people would need to post their difference from the GMT and yeah.... :-\

It's a lot of extra work I know. I'd just hate to have the quality of the comm go down just because some aren't honest enough to report if they didn't make the deadline or not.

Just a suggestion. I do love this place and want to see it continue.