Discourse is a little different and many people had some adjustment when we converted from phpBB. The best suggestion I can give you is to worry less about micromanaging what you have read and what you haven’t. Discourse keeps track of what discussions and topics you’re interested in and tries to direct you based on what you read and where your attention goes. The more you use it, the more what floats to the top is curated for you.
Discourse flows discussions on a timeline rather than as discrete separate messages you open and read individually. It remembers where you are, so if you only read half of a thread it will set a pointer there. As you pay attention to topics it will naturally show you new post counts in those.
The “New” and “Unread” tabs won’t behave as you expect - Discourse won’t show our entire archive back to 2006 as “new and unread”. “New” is topics that appeared since your last visit that you haven’t looked at, not new from the beginning of time. “Unread” is topics you have previously visited or participated in that have new replies - not every message you haven’t read. Discourse tries to curate messages based on what you pay attention to. “Latest” is where most everyone tends to navigate from, it’s the latest activity regardless of what you are specifically looking at.
You can always go by the Categories tab and pick to view single categories and sub categories where the most recent posts are at the top a little more like normal.
If you bring out the sidebar on the left there’s a keyboard icon that will show you functional keyboard shortcuts. For me Command-F pulls up Safari browser search and not the forum search, so I think it depends on the browser.
You might also want to change your theme - I find “Brutalist” is the best if you just want just text and tags and information. To change theme, bring out the left sidebar and choose a new theme on the bottom by the paintbrush icon.
Yeah, Discourse is weird, though I know we have blind people here who’ve figured out how to navigate it. Hmm… I should fire up a screenreader and try it: I haven’t done that here, I don’t think.
Threads are infinite-scroll: they load more posts as you scroll instead of having pagination. It does update the URL bar as you scroll to add slash-1 slash-2 slash-3 etc. (with the post number in that thread) to the end, so it is possible to link directly to a particular post. And they’ve messed with the Home and End keys so they take you all the way to the start and end of the whole thread, not just the start and end of the posts that are currently loaded.
It also doesn’t have a single forum index: you can get:
Categories gives info about the main categories but only shows a couple threads for each category.
Latest shows all the threads ordered by which one has the most recent post.
New shows threads that you haven’t looked at (I don’t use this much because it’s unstable: as soon as you view a thread it goes away).
Unread shows threads you’re tracking that have new posts since last time you read them (again, unstable).
Top topics is something I’ve never used, but it exists…
Don’t have to micro manage read/unread topics on the other forums I frequent, just mark everything read when I’m done reading what I want and then the next visit only has new stuff show up as unread.
Anyways, best I can tell, there’s nothing in the sidebar I can interact with aside from the expand/collapse button, and even in threads I’ve replied to, focus starts at the top of the page when I switch to the tab I opened a thread in(and for what it’s worth, the go to first unread post links works on all the other forums I frequent, across several different Forum backends). Honestly, only thing this place has going for it the phpBB forum I frequent doesn’t is HTML headings on links to individual threads and on the Username part of individual posts.
Double ctrl+F does work to get to Firefox’s search in page functionality… still feel like it’s rude for a website to interfere with browser and/or screen reader navigational hotkeys… So far, not impressed with Discourse, but at least this place hasn’t been killed off by people jumping ship to a Facebook Group or Discord Server, and the things I don’t like about are mostly minor annoyances rather than things that make me want to slap the developers with a fish and steal their mice and touchscreenscoughtheidiotsresponsibleforditchgmailbasichtmlinfavorofforcingstandardviewdowneveryone’sthroatscough.
Yup. Discourse is the kind of organization that brags on their homepage about how they hired an accessibility consultant once and can they please have a gold star, but when you point out accessibility problems all you hear are crickets.
I’m only active on one Forum that uses ZenForo, and it’s a very technically inclined forum, so I can’t say how stock/modified its copy of ZenForo is, but I consider it highly accessible… Categories on its index page are level 2 headings, links to subforums, links to individual threads, and the username on individual posts are all level 3 headings, the body of posts are block quotes, every thread as a text box for replying, it’s easy to tell which threads have new posts since last visit, the go to first unread link is right before the link to the beginning of the thread in the tab order and work properly most of the time. Biggest issues I have is that the easiest way to get to the mark entire forum read link on the index is to use ctrl+F to search the page text and clicking it gives an “Are you sure?” prompt, though thankfully, the mark forum read and cancel buttons are the only buttons on the page when that prompt comes up, so it’s trivial, and several members there have a bad habit of quoting the post immediately above their own, including the quote of the post two posts above, and so on so sometimes two or three posters will get into a lively discussion where they end up quoting half the thread in every post, and there’s no good way to skip over the quoted bits to read just the new bits, but that’s users being inconsiderate* in a way that’s a minor annoyance to 99.99% of users and only a major headache for people who can’t just quickly scroll past the wall of text with a different background color, not the software going against convention, doing things in a questionable way, or neglecting to implement little quality of life features.
*As an aside, it was a phpBB forum, and one that lost 99% of its traffic to its sister Discord server, so I no longer frequent, but I used to frequent a forum that actually had rules that you weren’t allowed to quote the post immediately above your own and which forbade nested quotes(I think they might have even had a mod installed that would automatically remove quoted text that was embedded within another quote. I don’t frequent that many forums these days with how just about everything these days is a Discord server or a Facebook Group and independantly hosted forums have become an endangered species, but I kind of wish more forums had such enforced quoting etiquette.
Though, to give Discourse credit where credit is due, there’s basically no cruft between user name and post body here, or at least it’s all on the same line as the Username, so trivial to skip without the benefit of the post body being a block quote or something similar.
