Sorry if this has been covered before; I didn’t find anything on it…
On the old site, especially if I’d been away for a while, I would often start from my activity page. You know, the list of all my previous posts. There would be a closed or open envelope next to each one, so I instantly knew if there was any new activity in thread in which I was participating.
I don’t see a similar feature here on Discourse. Am I missing something? I do know that I get notified if somebody replies directly to my particular post, but I want to see if anyone has replied to the thread in general without opening each one.
It depends on your forum and thread settings. Each forum and thread can be set to notify you or not when there’s a change. Click on the bell to change that. For forums, you’ll usually find it in the upper right corner of the forum page. For threads, it’s often at the very bottom of the thread (but before all the masthead stuff and suggested threads). Sometimes, it’s below the slider bar to the far right.
You can see the definitions for the various settings here under Forum & Thread Notifications.
You can also check your bookmarks if you’ve been bookmarking threads you’re interested in.
Also of note is the Unread section in the navigation bar (Categories, Latest, Top, etc). It hasn’t really shown up for me yet, but people say it’s there).
Ah, cool feature; you can pretty much customize how you are notified (or not) for any given thread. I’ll have to train myself to click on the little bell whenever I post, but I think I can get used to that.