Ok, I’ve done this. I’ve put everything into “Watched”. When I look at latest, this post:
Do you think of links as having ‘direction’?
shows as unread. I haven’t visited it. I don’t think so anyways. But when I go to unread and reverse sort, I can’t find it.
Default sort is newest first (which, according to my understood definition is “reverse chronological” going backwards through time to older dates).
If you flip to showing chronological / oldest, then you wouldn’t see stuff that has just been posted:
@boris
Some good tips and tricks are given here! I think this post shall be polished or part of it selected for How to Work with Talk.
We are using it the same way we got used in GG! Talk has many features which need to be learnt!
With all due respect to you all, I have absolutely no problems using discourse. This not to say I am a brainiac but something about the way I have learned it, perhaps my “attitude” to it, is why I am quickly mastering it.
I think the problem here is people are too smart. They are trying to customise before they understand how it works.
Discourse is a little smarter than us all and helps even totally new users to make their way and helps advanced users enormously. You can customise it to see everything that happens or nothing. So a new user may miss out on some obscure subject but I doubt they care. Discourse observes your use and activity and organises things according to that activity and interests expressed. Its an adaptive environment.
As you go about your activity look at your notifications, and the icon in front of them and when you are not happy, but may I suggest only get unhappy when something overwhelms you and is large in number. Try and work out how it came to notify you, normally this is for totally legitimate reasons.
Personally I think dismissing lists generated by an adaptive system only make sense in a case where you need to deal with a gross issue, these should be rare.
If for example you still use GG and don’t want to see them here its easy. If unsure I suggest using “normal notify” at the minimum so you are aware if someone replies to you or mentions you. Of course if you never reply in a topic the first will not occur.
Basically set up your preferences and live according to your notifications and occasionally browse the other areas out of interest.
Nutshell. Nailed.
I don’t want software that’s smarter than me. I want software that’s useful.
And, it is unnecessarily opinionated:
I don’t need an AI bot preaching to me, thank you very much. The bot can’t understand the context, so it doesn’t know … anything. Yet there it is, sermonizing. Also, I can post a hundred posts, but that doesn’t prevent someone else from posting.
About a third of the time I spend texting is used to undo the auto-correct. Software is only smarter than people in some very slim sliver of reality. But sometimes you need the wide focus of an actual human.
What we’re trying to do, or at least I am, is see if there’s a way that the “smart” software can act a little more like GG, for those people who don’t want to adjust their attitude right now 
To me it seems very like any other threaded forum, with a few perks on the side. But others apparently don’t see it that way, so why not see if there’s anything we can do to fill the gap?
I am so glad you are doing all this work. Users finding it difficult, messy and time consuming are not helped by being told, that others find i easy, logic and wonderful. I would expect this problem to grow with the amount of users.
What everyone has in common is, that they know where the Log Out button is - fast and easy. I do not find that a good idea, but we have to realise, that that is also a choice.
For what it’s worth, that has not been my experience in over four years helping run a Discourse forum.
I’ve honestly never seen a conversation/discussion like this one. I truly believe it’s because people are expecting something from Discourse that, either it wasn’t designed to deliver, or that their expectation is based “something else” (GG, for example, or a mailing list).
As I implied above in endorsing @TW_Tones post, I think people might by carrying the baggage of past experience while using Discourse. That’s not helping – that’s hindering you, in my view.
I meant to add, I DO agree with @Mark_S about the blue popup box that appears on the right. It’s very annoying.
However, that has little to do with grasping how Discourse manages your daily use of the service.
It’s demeaning, which interferes with the Discourse experience.
It was probably intended for social media, but a platform for discussing software has different requirements. In social media, you want like a dozen or more people expounding on global warming, or the benefits of raising bunnies in your bathroom. With software, the number of contributors is irrelevant.
It may be just a phase we’re going through. Maybe a year from now it won’t matter and everyone’s attitude will have adjusted. With that other forum, were they transferring from a lively, active existing forum with nothing fundamentally wrong? Or was it a new experience with nothing significant to compare it to?
The former, though the software was pretty simplistic in nature and didn’t allow (for example) easy drag-drop image posting, etc.
Agreed, though I choose not to take it personally 
Listen, let me put it all like this…
If Discourse’s approach to discussions is impeding you, then by all means kick up a fuss. If there’s any part of you that thinks it might be you getting in your own way, then give the software a chance.
Honestly, GG always got in my way (why you see more of me here – less minutes spent at war in my head – ring a bell? )
I sincerely hope so.
So let me summarize what we have so far. You can get something like what TT wants by first going under your preferences → notifications → categories.
Add all categories that you’re interested in (which will probably be all) to the first item at the top, “Watched”.
Save your changes.
Now when you want to see your “unread”, go to the “unread” tab at the top. You may need to change the “Activity” sort order if you have a lot of “unread” posts.
When you want to mark everything as read, click on the surprised hamburger “topics” at the left of the posts.
Select “Select all”.
Then click on “Dismiss…” over on the right hand side.
There will be a dialog making sure this is what you want to do. Inside that dialog select “Stop tracking…” .
Wow. I had to make do with the heart emoji - it really should have been a superhero.
Now with this clear description, we have a starting point.
If you select “stop tracking these topics”, then if there are replies in those topics, they won’t show up in unread. Which may or may not be what you want to do.
Birthe et al,
Actually If I was to stay silent on this, a vocal minority would give most people the feeling its a serious problem. I think it is important for people to realise others are not having a problem, and just perhaps they themselves are making it more complicated than it need be.
I don’t want software that’s smarter than me. I want software that’s useful.
And, it is unnecessarily opinionated:
What I am saying here is Discourse has in its functions and features a deep history and experience of online collaboration and communications, It works to support both the naïve and expert, the different problems communities can face with moderation and administration, it works to minimise effort, and allow you to keep track in a barrage of content. It is smarter than us because it knows more than us as its evolved over time. The only way you can be smarter than Discourse when it comes to discourses speciality, is if you too have the experience of using and running communities.
Its not like my “criticism of the criticisms” has not come with information, evidence and instructions.
Personally when I do not understand something, I assume it is a deficit in my own understanding, unfortunately these conversations quickly go to saying Discourse is the problem.
Another problem is people want to prove their argument that something could be better and don’t necessarily “keep an open mind” to see if their argument actually carries a misunderstanding.
Further I have acknowledge that people with different needs may find adoption difficult. I am happy to help them and recommended we retain GG indefinitely.
In short many wax lyrical about what is wrong with Discourse, so to suppress someone waxing lyrical that there is nothing wrong with discourse, would introduce a systemic bias.
We must be able to agree to disagree otherwise we loose objectivity and engage in group think.
I think that’s what’s wanted – to mark these as read, i.e. one’s that you don’t want to see under unread.
This post illustrates my generic skepticism about Discourse specifics in a neat way.
I am very much in favour of getting off GG. And I do, now, like many things in Discourse. BUT this thread itself illustrates well that basic solutions are over-convoluted.
There is a lack of decent documentation for newbies.
@TW_Tones has made some good points, as has @Birthe , and as has my friend @CodaCoder. All of which underline the point that Discourse is an entire “System”
Whilst it is easy to see GG refugees as slightly idiot (with some merit) I do think that solutions on Discourse need be transparent & simple.
Looking at this thread they look very over-complex.
Just a comment
TT
Right. Discourse is rife with opinions. There is a whole industry of Backroom Boys assuming you are not-doing all sorts of crud in its basic code-base.
Of course it is a moderate middle class hokum that is difficult to exculpate because of its blandness. Doesn’t do too much damage. TT
Even in an infinite multiverse I can’t imagine the probabilistic possibilities of that sentence arising more than once 
(I’ll get my coat)
