Does the forum have a way to “mark all posts as read”? If so, where can I find it? When coming back after some time, it is kind of annoying I have to visit every topic separately and scroll to the bottom just to set it to read (and I don’t like to leave it in “unread” state as that makes the threads I’m interested in following stand out less).
I hadn’t found this earlier, until just now: At the front page, the “Categories / Latest” pop-up menu has an “Unread” option, and this page has a “Dismiss” button.
hjh
Unless I misunderstood something, topics that I’ve started reading at some point (which would be most of them) but no longer seem interesting/relevant to me are not listed as “unread”, so this is probably not entirely what I’m looking for.
Aha, I see… That seems over-engineered 
There is a preference to start “tracking” a topic after x amount of time reading it. The default is 4 minutes but it can be as low as 30 seconds. I guess that if a topic is being tracked and gets new posts, then it could be unread.
If there’s really not a way to just mark all read, then that’s a thumbs down… there’s some care taken to implement a more complex system of “tracking” but not just a simple nuclear option, really?
Oh… apparently the Discourse devs are rather closed minded about this. It’s a remarkable read, quite spectacular denial of common sense. 'Mark as read' needed within categories - feature - Discourse Meta
hjh
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Browsing that topic was not the best possible way to start my day, but thanks for linking it here 
I’ve noticed a general hesitancy from the Discourse devs with anything that “prevents” Discourse from being the only source of constant engagement for content. For instance, the internal archiving functionality is excellent, but getting posts out of the system is pretty rough – they did finally add the ability to view entire threads as raw markdown, but there was a similar amount of puzzlement in threads about printing and saving things out. Plus all the email mode stuff…
It’s taken me a while to get used to Discourse as a forum platform, and mostly I like it now. But it is incredibly strange to me the amount standard functionality built into older forum software that was left out. Very contemporary-mainstream view of how the internet should function I suppose.
Seems the problem indeed is solved by changing “automatically track topics I enter” to “immediately” in my preferences. The threads that receive an update then also get listed in the “unread” list.