Here’s some advice for the folks that find it hard to keep track of the threads they’ve posted to:
The Board has a neat feature to make it easy to keep track of the threads you’ve posted to. I’ve been much happier since I found this. I don’t know whether it works for guests or not. For $1.25 a month you can solve that “guest” problem though.
Go to http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/profile.php?do=editoptions and about halfway down is a drop-down for “Default Thread Subscription Mode”. I bet yours is set to “Do Not Subscribe”. Change that to “No email notification” and click [Save changes] at the bottom.
Thereafter you can click “User CP” in the top menu bar and be shown a list of the threads you’ve posted to that anyone else has later posted to since you last logged on. They’re sorted by most recent posting date/time with newest on top. The header says “New Subscribed Threads” but it really means “Updated Subscribed Threads.”
In other words, it’s a list of everything you’ve already expressed interest in that has changed recently and hence deserves a new look-see.
At the bottom of that list is a link saying “View All Subscribed Threads”. If you click that you can see all the threads you’ve posted to, listed in order of most recent update by anyone. This makes it easy to find a thread you remember you posted to a month or two ago without needing to search for it. Or one that hasn’t changed since you last logged in, but has older changes you haven’t seen.
In addition to all that, in any of the forum table of contents pages (e.g. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?f=2) you’ll see a blue check-mark icon to the right of any thread you’ve posted to.
The only gotcha with all this is the settings change isn’t retroactive. So if you change it today, your personal history will start accumulating from today forward. Older threads you posted to won’t appear unless you post to them again.