Yes, it would (or rather should) be possible to create these “reading holes” that way.
My second suggested change is supposed to hint at the reading holes issue. I suppose there are generally two ways to solve this:
I can not evaluate how gray and blue unread counters are relevant here, because I don’t clearly understand how they work at this moment, however.
I like it and asked before
yeah I use Discourse as a teacher and there are topics I need to come back to in like 4 months (Bookmark) and there are topics I need to remember to answer in a few days (mark as undread).
Agreed! I need a feature like this. Any workaround with a plug-in?
Any progress on this? Is it on the roadmap?
It is not on any roadmap I am aware of. Use bookmarks.
Assuming that the Discourse Calendar plugin will also work in PMs, perhaps you can work around it by creating a calendar PM to yourself and adding replies with links to posts you want to come back to at a certain point in time?
That sounds awfully complex when we already have several means to track notable threads.
Absolutely. It was just an idea for those who are not happy with existing functionality.
A theme component can now allow you to do this per:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/defer-topic-button-mark-topic-unread/110951
Can you maybe elaborate how to do it?
The linked topic is not existing or accessible.
I think it’s because that function is now standard, rather than in a theme component.
If you open up ‘Topic Controls’ at the bottom of a topic you should see the option in there:
Is that something that needs to be enabled?
I neither see it here, nor on discuss.gradle.org.
You must enable it first on your profile settings at Discourse Meta - The Official Support Forum for Discourse. It can also be enabled by default for new users using the site setting at /admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=defer
Ah, thanks.
Didn’t expect that is something you need or can toggle.
If you don’t want it, you just can avoid pressing the button just like the bookmark button and so on.
The original reasoning between the settings is that it adds clutter to the topic bottom, specially on the desktop. The feature is also only useful for “inbox zero” workflow adepts, which is expected to be smaller than the population who uses bookmarks and the other buttons in the same area.
I don’t agree that it is only useful for “inbox zero”.
I’m more like “inbox 10_000” and still want to mark topics unread.
I really missed that functionality and always mourned about Discourse not having such a basic functionality.
Until I decided to report it and now found out that the functionality always was there, just very well hidden. 
Curious, do you use bookmark reminders?
Sometimes I do that.
I had no idea about this feature either! I will now enable it on sites I use and see if it is useful for me. Something I’ve always wanted to be able to do, esp on topics with long posts that I don’t always have time or brain space to respond to at the particular moment that I open them.
Bookmarks with reminders actually work extremely well and I have become accustomed to using them, so likely I will not start deferring topics.
