Since it’s canned, you can’t see or alter the parameters. For instance, this morning at about 7:30 AM, clicking on New Posts brought up 14 threads. Now, come on! I know darn well that a lot more than 14 threads have been posted to in the last however many hours the search is set for. Heck, I’ll bet more than that have been posted to in the last hour!
You can’t replicate the New Posts search in Advanced search, since you have to enter keywords or user name, so there’s no remedy there.
If you had already been looking around (whether you were posting or not) before you went to the New Posts, it’s possible that your session had timed out and reset, so that the 14 posts you got to see all were updated since your time-out. The mysteries of the time-out are still unclear to me, but I do know they’re difficult for me to predict.
For that reason, I take note of the “You last visited” time when I first get into SDMB so that I can use that as a reference to go to the individual forum details and look for things that were updated after that “last visited” point. That’s much messier than being able to get all the “new” threads in one search, but it does allow me to get caught up.
As a further preventive measure, my first action is to Search under my Username to see all the threads that have been updated – that I have posted in – since I was here last. That cuts down on the number that I know I want to check on. If I haven’t timed out by the time I finish the Search group, then is when I’ll go for New Posts. So far, it’s worked pretty well.
Ah, I see, that explains a lot, since I’ve noticed that when I first log in and do the New Posts thing, there’s a “normal” number of posts in it, then when I go back, only a handful.
During the portion of the year when I’m here almost every day, the usual number of “New Posts” is somewhere between 8 and 12 pages if I check in at about the same time of day each day. As soon as I have caught up with the ones I’m interested in, I will “Log Out” to force a reset of my “You last visited” time. That lets a fresh “New Posts” show just a page or two and I will check back to that page to see if any that I was already interested in, or any new ones that attract my attention, have been updated.
After an hour or so, further New Posts searches will move on toward 4 or 5 pages worth and then I’ll Log Out again to cut back on the ones that show up. Over the course of the day, if I’m here for most of it, and I usually am, I will Log Out several times. If the day’s activity is heavier than normal and/or there are more threads than usual that I feel like keeping up with, I may be doing the Log Out routine more often.
I do not subscribe to threads, but manage my awareness of them as I have described. Now that the server isn’t bogging down when I do the New Posts search, I’m content with this method, but if somebody has an even more efficient way of keeping up with both older threads one has posted in and new threads that one might want to investigate and maybe post in, I’m open to improvements.