+1.
SORT IT.
“Body seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?” What ?!!
How do you start a new topic?
On my screen, at least (Dope Light on a Mac desktop in Firefox):
Go way up to the top of the page and click on the Straight Dope header.
Near the top of the page, set the resulting page to Categories.
Click on the category you want to post in.
Near the top right of the page, click on the New Topic box.
That should get you a screen with a text box and with a title box just above it; probably with your cursor already set in the title box.
Type / enter stuff; then below the text box hit either “create topic” or “cancel”.
Red line is back for me, at least for the moment. I even got a screen shot.
OK. New actual data: the red line is indeed there for me – but only if I’m looking at one specific category at a time. It doesn’t show in the “all categories” page.
Which is really, really annoying; because that’s the way I always check for new threads, because I’m interested in and post in threads in a number of different forums. I often don’t even know what forum a thread is in, and I don’t want to have to search for updated threads over and over again separately in each forum.
– nanny discobot, no I can’t add this as an edit to my last post, I’m way past the edit limit (though I did accidentally delete it doublechecking, and have to add it back in again). And I didn’t include it in the previous reply because I didn’t know it then!
If you select by new, isn’t that by default new posts? I think you can set how old a thread can be and show up as new in your preferences.
ETA: I take it back. I see the red line when I select by New, so never mind
It being the red line. I vote for that too.
That’s new threads. I don’t think it includes old threads with new posts in them.
The closest thing to that is “latest”, which shows both old threads with new posts and new threads, as near as I can tell; but, for me at least, no red line. The list continues on way beyond whenever I last read it, so there’s no good way to tell which threads actually have new posts in them.
Unless, of course, I set them all to tracking; but if I do that, there’s no way to distinguish threads I’ve posted in from those I haven’t. As it is, if I want to distinguish the ones I’ve posted in, I have to individually set threads I’ve read back to ‘normal’, as if I read them for any length of time those set themselves to ‘tracking’ also.
It’s nowhere to be seen no matter what I do, and it used to be visible in the past regardless of my activity.
Step 4, there is no “new topic” box. Choices are:
New (1) / Latest / Top / [+] / [bell]
The + box yields the dead-end described earlier.
How do I change to Dope Lite? Preferences was a wrong first-guess.
Go into Preferences and look for Interface.
On the other hand, my previous advice apparently didn’t work, so maybe that won’t either.
i was using Sam’s Silly. But changing to Lite, I still have no “new topic”’ option, that page remains the same. But at least, Fighting Ignorance is back on my banner
I am also using Sam’s Simple. You should see this (which you have to click to view because inline images are disabled 
)
Do I have to keep clicking white spaces until it pops into view? Or is there some grayed-out image it is hiding behind?
Not sure what you mean? I took a screenshot of how the page looks on my desktop. Click the link to see the image. The New Topic button is in the upper right. If you are also using Sam’s Simple theme, I have no clue why you aren’t seeing that button on your browser. Are you running some kind of script that might be removing certain features?
I use the same theme and I can see the same thing. The [+ New Topic] button is visible when viewing the forum/category, not the posts within a thread/topic.
OK, I see Exactly the same – Except the word’ “new topic” are not in the box, only the +sign. That opens a field for “optional tags” which says “mot found” if I enter text.
^^^^^ If I switch from Firefox to Chrome, it’s the same.
Maybe someone can open a dedicated topic about this and get wider input. Or a mod can open my account and explore it from the inside.
I also want the red line back. It was very helpful.