That’s assuming that everyone who replied to a post used the right reply button. They don’t always, especially if they’re replying to the immediately preceding post.
I don’t see anything about badges and haven’t gotten any kind of message about them. Not sure what the complaints are about. 
You’ve probably gotten notifications for them. You get them for your first post, your first quote, your first everything.
Go here to see all the (currently) possible badges.
(A green check means you’ve already earned it. Some can be earned multiple times. A number shows how many other people have them.)
And congratulations to our first New User of the Month, BippityBoppityBoo!
I’m hoping you give it a try for a few days. It’s not that awful after you post a few times.
Toward the top right of any given page here you will see your avatar. Click on that to see your badges.
Well yeah, I see the list there, but I don’t understand how that has any effect on reading the board or why people are so upset by them? They don’t appear on the posts or on the board itself so, what I am missing? Who cares that if you click on your avatar there is a list of badges?
When you first join (or get migrated) you get a buttload of badges right away, and all those “pointless” notifications piss some folks off.
I think the badges annoy people – at least some of the most basic ones – just because they seem so pointless and juvenile. A badge for making your first post? Whoopie! A badge for making your first reply to someone else’s post? Yowza! A badge for liking a post? Yee-Haw! A badge for posting a link? Oh, how worldly wise!
Makes the board look-and-feel like a hang-out for teeny-boppers, which maybe is how the software is actually intended.
Just ignore all the fucking badges.
Exactly!
Dismiss Notifications and go about your day.
When I click on my user name the list that appears does not include Settings as an option.
Try Preferences.
Adding to the litany of complaints about the new site, it seems it is no longer possible to reliably use your browser’s “Find” option to search the text of the current thread. This is due to two design flaws: First, the website hijacks the usual browser Ctrl+F shortcut so that it pops up its own overengineered search interface. (All I want is to search for a few strings in the page! I don’t want a Google-like experience with yet another infinitely scrolling page of individual search results.) Now, at least with my browser, this custom search engine can be avoided in favour of the native search by pressing Ctrl+F a second time, but searching this way doesn’t work because Discourse dynamically changes the content of the page such that only a few posts appear on it at any one time. So at best Ctrl+F allows you to search for text a few posts before and after the one you’re currently reading. 
Oh, by the way, you see a vertical slider immediately to the right of the list of posts, right? It’s like a scroll bar, but it’s put there by the website rather than by the browser itself. You should be able to click that and drag it to the top or bottom to get to post #1 or the final post.
That doesn’t help people like @Llama_Llogophile and myself who want to use keyboard navigation. I don’t like having to constantly switch between the mouse and the keyboard for very basic navigation functionality.
There’s quite a lot you can do with keyboard navigation using keyboard short-cut keys. For example, if you know the post number you want to go to (or a close guess), type # and you get to enter either a post number or a date, and it takes you there.
There are many more keyboard short-cut keys. Type ? so see a list of them.
Indeed, it seems you can do pretty much everything except automatically advance to the bottom of the page, which is such a common action that it has a standard keyboard shortcut that is universally recognized and implemented everywhere outside of Discourse. In theory you can get the same functionality here by looking over to the scrollbar on the right to make a note of how many messages are in the thread, and then typing # followed by the number of messages followed by Enter, though that’s arguably not a “shortcut” any more. And at any rate, it doesn’t work in browsers like mine that use the keyboard for instant find-as-you-type. I am not going to disable this globally just so that I can work around a design defect in the one Discourse site I visit.
Does that standard keyboard shortcut for getting to the bottom of the page work for you in Discourse? In my machine (a MacBook laptop), the shortcut is Command+DownArrow, and that works here in Discourse too. Note that Discourse must necessarily hijack that function to implement it in it’s own way, to deal with the fact that an entire long thread is not all loaded. But it seems to do it right for me.
Another quick way to get to the first or last post of a thread, using the mouse: Note that scroll bar on the right of the posts, where it shows what post you are at. At the top of that is the date or time of the first post. Click on that to go there. At the bottom is the date or time of the latest post. Click on that to go there. I just discovered that, by trying it.
Not consistently. (I thought that’s what we were discussing here all along.) Sometimes it seems to advance only as far down as there are messages in the page cache, after which Discourse proceeds to load in some more of them. I haven’t been able to figure out the exact circumstances in which it behaves this way as opposed to taking me to the honest-to-Og final message in the thread. Maybe it’s dependent on the theme? I haven’t noticed the problem since switching to Vincent, though I did that only a few hours ago.
Seems to me I’ve noticed that a few times, but it nearly always seems to do the right thing. I wonder if it’s just a glitch or bug in the software that maybe we just have to live with?
On a computer, at least (I’m using a laptop), it’s there in Sam’s Simple.