The way I understand it is that Discourse has a different philosophy to phpBB in that it’s not like an email inbox that you need to read everything, with that pressure to have read everything always gnawing at you.
The way I use it is to not worry about whether a thread is read or not, but do the following:
- Scan the “new” tab for topics of interest, or read everything depending on how much time I have. My preferences (under “Notifications”) are set to automatically “track” topics that I spend more than 4 minutes reading, or if I reply, or if I press the keys “m” and “t” in rapid succession to “track” the topic. Any topics remaining in “new” can be acknowledged by clicking “dismiss new”
-
Any update to topics I track will then appear in the “unread” tab, which I check next.
-
Lastly, if I want to look at what’s going on in conversations that I’ve skipped over previously, I can browse the category topic list and review everything up to the “last visit” line which shows me where I got to last time I visited. Again, I don’t feel compelled to read everything above this line.
Again, I understand this is quite different to the workflow that we’ve been all used to in phpBB, but as I become more used to it, I find it quite freeing to be able to keep up with new and interesting topics without having to read every update to every topic or continuously “mark all as read”.
Leaving topics as genuinely unread means that if I come back to it in the future (e.g. via search) then I actually know whether I’ve read it or not.
There’s obviously been quite a bit of thought that’s gone into this, so I’d really encourage you to give it a try and not worry too much about finding a way to “mark all as read”.