We’ve talked in the staff IRC channel some about Discourse; not everyone is convinced that all of Discourse’s assumptions are universally correct for every community, but everyone is definitely keeping an eye on the app as it evolves. We’re content with phpBB for now—well, that’s not exactly true. The pain of migrating away from phpBB right now outweighs the benefits, since one of the huge positives about the Ars forum is its 14 years’ worth of posts. That was why it took so long to jump off of Infopop to phpBB in the first place—finding a way to migrate the posting history.
However, back to the topic—I do have some additional observations. My style of reading, usually, is to look at the “Latest” list, and open every topic I want to read in a new tab. Then, one by one I work my way through all the open tabs. I’m noticing when I do this that it occasionally seems to confuse Discourse, and even if I read all the way through a topic from top to bottom, I’ll occasionally get notified that the topic still has “old” posts (via the gray number badge, instead of the blue one). When this happens, I find I have to revisit the topic and scroll through it, sometimes several times, for Discourse to correctly note that I’ve read all the posts.
This might just be because I’m doing this with dozens of tabs, but it does seem a little funky. When I’m re-visiting a topic just to make the notification badge go away, I’m definitely wishing for that “mark all read” button then 