Entering a topic means that a user opened/entered that topic, for example if you click on a topic and load the page in your browser. You can enter a topic, but you might not read all of the posts in said topic. So Topics Entered will reflect you opened/entered that topic.
Posts read will indicate the number of posts that had that blue dot next to the time the post was made disappear, meaning you read the post.
The exact time necessary to look at a post before consdering the post “read” changes depending on the length of the post, but typically you need to have a post on screen for at least a few seconds before the post will be consider read.
The way Discourse tracks time reading posts is a little more complex, but there’s a couple keys points about how this is tracked:
- Each time you look at a topic we will log a maximum of 6 minutes reading time per post (this will reset if you navigate away and back to the post). There is no upper limit on read time per post, a post can be read for days by a user if the user returns to a topic.
- If 3 minutes pass and you have not scrolled at all, we disable this subsystem until stuff scrolls again
If you’re interested, you can read more about how we tracking reading time in Discourse here: