Infinite scroll is still a bad idea. But other than that, I agree.
Here’s one thing I miss about vBulletin: the listing of threads in each forum had icons to indicate which threads you had posted in. I haven’t found that function in Discourse, and would love to see in restored or implemented.
There isn’t exactly that feature that I’ve found. But you can dupilicate it exactly if you want, at the expense of losing another possibly useful feature. See below.
From the category listing you can tell which ones you’ve read by the different color. In my theme those are sorta subdued = grayed out whereas the ones I haven’t read are full brightness. That doesn’t differentiate between ones I’ve posted to vs. only read.
You can perform a search for your posts within a category and the results come back with newest on top. So the first few are the recent ones. You can also limit that search to just the e.g. last week, month, 3 months, 74 days, whatever.
You can adjust your preferences so the Unread page only shows threads you’ve posted to that have new action on them. But doing that has the effect of losing track of threads you’re following only to read, not to post.
If that’s a tradeoff that works for you, go to your user control panel, then Preferences, then Notifications. Set the second dropdown “automatically track topics I enter” to “Never”. That means reading without posting won’t add that thread to your Unread page.
Make sure the next dropdown “When I post in a topic, set that topic to” is set to “tracking”. That way all posted threads will be on your Unread page. That is the Discourse default, so it’s probably already set to that.
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it, but it really isn’t a great alternative to the way vBulletin handled it. ISTM that rather than this workaround, just looking through one’s own history is simpler and more comprehensive.
There’s gotta be some way for what you want. When I go to a “forum”, it has a blue dot with a number in it which I think is number of posts since I visited the thread. Sometimes, there’s a gray circled number that means … something? I think it’s only happens on threads I talked in.
eta: I am using the “Straight Dope Light” skin.
I used to do that all the time when I was reading a long thread on an airplane before takeoff. Just load the page in my browser, then click to load another page in a new tab of the browser, and so on until I had loaded all of it. Then, after putting my phone in airplane mode, I could finish reading the thread.
Yup. Hate that. But it’s the second worst thing. The worst thing is that nothing in this software is well organized by location. It’s just not designed for a spacial thinker.
Cool, will play with that.
How do you switch to ‘mobile view’? What is it and how is it different from ‘desktop view’?
If you’re on a phone or tablet, you should get it automatically. There’s no advantage at all to using it on a desktop/laptop.
If you want to try it on a desktop go to
https://boards.straightdope.com/?mobile_view=1
You can switch back by going to the hamburger menu ☰ and clicking ‘Desktop View’, or the same link as above with ?mobile_view=0
This might help. You can get a listing of all the threads you’ve posted in. Click on the link in the post below and then bookmark it. They’re not by forum, but you can do a bit of a sort by views, activity, etc. I miss codinghorror He had a lot of great tips like this and could probably answer a bunch of these questions.
One thing you can do is bookmark all the threads you post in.
You have to do it manually, but then you will get a bookmark icon next to the thread.
Either use the button at the bottom of the thread, or press B.
Cool! Adding codinghorror’s suggestion to yours, people wanting to have that function could use the link https://boards.straightdope.com/posted to find the threads they’ve posted in, then bookmark all of those to get a visual from the bookmark icon to see the threads they’ve posted in glancing down the page of a forum.
Yes, but then i have too much bookmarked to use the bookmarks as… Bookmarks. When i get a new update to OOTS I want to be able to find that thread to post the update. And without bookmarks that’s very hard.
This isn’t bad, and is a little more convenient than going to my posting history in my profile. But still not as nice as vBulletin’s icons.
This is much better, and would be perfect if I could find a way of going back and automatically bookmarking all 6,500 of my posts over the past 18 years. 
But I might start bookmarking the threads I post in from now on. Thanks, all, for the tips.