When I first got onto the site many years ago the first thing i set out to do was to learn how to navigate the site and read the most current posts. Like most I bookmarked and came in thru the main welcome screen, but i suppose there are those who just link to their favorite topic area. It took me a bit to figure out how to navigate around and use the features. From the home screen the easiest way to see if there is a new post in a particular forum areas are by the yellow boxes (callout 1 in the pix below). Once you click into the forum area any post that is BOLD is unread and when clicked on and read it will be cleared from the counter, however unlike other websites just entering the forum area will not mark the all contents "read", only the ones you physically open. Trying to go thru all the forms and sub-forums and open each post would likely take a lifetime. As this site has a wealth of information there are thousands of historical posts spanning many years
Here's the short way to clear the Unread Posts counter in the upper Right Hand corner of the Forum so you can focus on new posts.
From your Avitar box in the upper right hand corner click on the unread posts (callout 2)
This will take you to a screen with all the unread posts in chronological order, initially there will be pages and pages of them... this is where i spend most of my time looking into the new posts that interest me. From that screen the best way to get around (while clearing the post count anyway) is to select the forum area to the right if the post (callout 3) which will take you to that Forum area (or if you got to that topic area from the welcome screen). Some of the forum areas (our Town) have sub forums as well with the yellow boxes showing unread posts
When done viewing the posts in that particular forum (or sub-forum) area the cleanup can begin, rather than hit the back arrow on your browser click on the Forum Tools box (callout 4), a dropdown box will appear and you can then select the Mark This Forum Read (callout 5). Warning once you do the next step you cant "undo it" once marked read you cant go back. The system will then mark all the posts "read" (un-bold). Make note that when you do this it will also make all the sub-forums "read" as well and the post counter will drop.
Again rather than hitting the back arrow just click on the Unread Posts (callout 2) again to be taken back to the new posts page and all the "read" posts will have disappeared and you can move onto the next area. Initially you will likely see a big drop in the unread post counter as you "clear" the forums.
This process gives a good way to clear the unread counter and get you familiar with the various forums in the site. It took me a couple nights of non-serious efforts to eventually work the counter all the way down to 0 so that when i come in all that shows up is the count of the newest posts. Some forums i only pop into just to mark them read.
Hope this helps
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