The “view unread posts” function is gone. How do I see which posts I haven’t read yet?
The unread page is at https://intfiction.org/unread
Discourse has different tracking levels, and by default only posts you created, replied to, spent more than 4 minutes reading, or otherwise tracked will be shown in the unread page. But you can also set a category to watch or track all new posts.
The unread page will be shown in the top menu if there are any posts which meet these requirements.
Can’t you make it so that all unread posts show there by default? Requiring people to dig up the preferences and manually insert each and every forum section into a “watched” list doesn’t sound like a good idea. There’s not even an option for “all” or similar. You really have to go through each and every forum section and add it. And if the forum adds a new section in the future, the watched list will be out of sync. Users need to manually keep an eye.
It’s safe to assume that most people won’t be doing this, so more posts will be going unnoticed from now on compared to before, where we could:
- Click “view unread posts.”
- Read the ones that seem interesting.
- Click “mark forums as read” afterwards.
This seems no longer possible, unless you jump through broken-by-design hoops to get it kind of working?
You might like to set these notification preferences:
- Consider topics new when: I haven’t viewed them yet
- Automatically track topics I enter: immediately
With these two preferences, all new posts will come up in one of the two lists.
It’s not identical to phpBB’s behaviour, but it’s kind of close.
I’ve been looking to see if there’s a way to track all categories, but it doesn’t seem like there is. The other option would be to just add them all one by one. It’s not too many… if you ask nice we might even do it for you. 
I’m talking about posts though, not topics. Setting these options does nothing for posts in existing topics.
New posts in tracked topics will be shown in the Unread page, that’s the whole point of it? The issue is there’s no easy way to automatically track everything (which is what phpBB’s behaviour was), but once a topic is tracked, all new posts will be shown in Unread.
Firefox doesn’t seem to do anything with the RSS link other than offering to download it. Also, how would one mark the posts as “read” in an RSS feed?
So if I forget to track a topic, then that’s it. It will go unnoticed for all eternity.
The new forum is horrible :-/
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Well, that is what the “Automatically track topics I enter: immediately” setting fixes…
But I don’t enter each and every topic. I just want to see what posts I haven’t read yet regardless of whether I entered the topic or not.
Go to your profile preferences and to “Categories” on the left. You should be able to choose what categories you want to automatically track messages in.
It’s actually customized per user. Not everyone wants to see unread by default.
Go to your profile preferences on the Interface page and set your home page to “Unread”.
That doesn’t do anything useful. It just changes the forum home page.
Bottom line: the functionality we had before is gone.
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I may be confused about the suggestion here, but wouldn’t his put every topic you haven’t entered in “New” and every topic with unread posts that you have entered in “Unread”? Those would contain all and only the topics that used to show up under “unread posts.”
It’s now split across two pages instead of one, but if you look at both pages it doesn’t seem like you should lose anything forever?
Firefox is not a RSS reader, that should be a separate program. It’s an ancient standard for reading news and new forum posts.
Or just do what Hanon suggested and add all categories to watched. Not everyone wants to track new discussions about Inform or TADS.
I’ve added all categories to tracked - well all top level categories e.g. Authoring, Site Feedback etc. I still have a blank unread page. Which is a shame, because I always used view unread posts on the old site. Will keep trying to fix …
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It’s likely everything you’ve already read on the old forum remains marked read. Unread posts (the posts and the button) won’t appear unless there is a new unread message in any of the topics you are tracking.
No there are unread things I hadn’t seen, posted since I woke up late today UK time. I’m now trying adding all the sub categories too.