Suppose a thread has 50 posts. I haven’t read the last 15. I understand it will be colored until I read the new stuff, but how do I (1) identify the new stuff, and (2) get to it efficiently?
At the moment, you’ll see the last 8, and be able to open up the previous 8, the first 8, or all other messages. In due course, it might be worth finding a way to colour new posts on a first read, but for the time being I think we need to see how the current set-up goes.
IMHO, it definitely needs to open with the paging set up such that the first unread message is displayed, and with the window scroll position such that that message is visible on the screen. I think it should be high on the list of priorities because it’s gonna become an inconvenience once we start getting longer threads. Luckily it sounds reasonably straightforward to do 
Agree, and delighted to hear it sounds doable.
Hold your horses there, chief - little more thought needed - because you’re coming at it from the point of view of an avid forum user who reads everything that gets posted - but say I don’t pay much attention to a particular thread, but I do pop in from time to time - I don’t want the thread to open 100 messages short of the latest because it presumes I’m interested in all the stuff since the last time I visited.
How about an extra link (generally not in favour of extra links) for ‘open all new posts’…?
Are you sure? I’d say that wanting to read the new replies on a thread you care about is more common, regardless of how active you are on the forum, than just wanting to see the last few.
Plus, if you do just want to see the last few, you have only to scroll to the bottom, which is easy; however, scrolling to the middle when you want to see the oldest unread message is much harder…
Sorry - you’re still thinking like a heavy user, and we have loads and loads of people who are very infrequent users - in fact, they are an overwhelming majority - if the default behaviour is for them to find themselves (potentially) in the middle of a long thread when they visit again (having not been on the site for several weeks/months?), they’re going to be a lot more likely to get lost/frustrated than if a heavy user needs to click once more to open up ‘every new post’…
Ok… Not liking that!!!
…I’ve just tried to write out a reply on my iPad with regards to how posts appear on individual users accounts, then my finger accidentally touched another thread, which then opened and my reply was lost! Tried to go back a page to see if I could recover the comments and they were gone for good!!! 
Anyway, what I was trying to suggest was… Maybe a setting in the ‘Account Settings’ menu where individual users can select their preference to how their posts appear in their accounts. So, someone who visits the forum often may select for new posts to appear at the top, and those who prefer the posts as they come can also select this preference (which will appear as default). Those who select the ‘new posts at the top’ option and don’t log in for some time will, when logged in again, see a pop-up asking of they wish to keep their original setting or to change to default (either temporarily for that session or until they change it back to their preferred setting), so they don’t miss any important posts.
On the old forum, I’ve bookmarked it on the. ‘View Active Topics’ page so all the new threads I haven’t seen are always on the top, and I’m used to just selecting the last page to view the current messages and working backwards. This would be a very useful function (although it could also be more work to what’s already a long list of things to do) but just an idea that cropped up!
Edit: just trying out the ‘edit’ function! Yep, that works!
Yep, edit works great!
I do the same thing as you on the old forum to find what I haven’t read.
I did something on my iPad, btw, that made the ‘frames’ move around out of kilter (left side versus right side). I closed and came back and all was well. Just fyi.
While it varies by thread, I think even an infrequent user is going to want to read many conversations from where they left off reading them, and certainly the people who answer the majority of questions and requests for info are pretty heavy users, and will want that feature. Very important not to make the forum a chore for them.
Yeah, still don’t like this at all. I really do want to read the next new message, not the latest. And that scrolling thing on the left is just annoying.
Lots on additional mouse clicking, the titles don’t show fully on the left. So yeah, not for me. I probably won’t be using this much when the old forum goes.
Sorry about that, Gav - we’ll put it on the list to try and find a defensive move for that one!
Not sure about the settings - sounds like extra complication for me - but it might be an idea we come back to at some point, so thanks for the contribution… View Active Topics is essentially what the left-hand bar is here…
@Diane - I think the heaviest users will rarely find a thread that has more than 8 new posts since they last visited, so the ‘from first new post onwards’ looks to me like a fix for a real edge case - a heavy users who has been away for a while - and it’s a fix that could be a pain in the neck for less frequent users. I think we need to watch for a while to see if there’s any real pain about this, and if there is I still think that a link to open ‘to first new post’ is a solution that will work for the ‘heavy user who’s been away for a while’ scenario.
It’s a pity you feel like that, Susanna. Where are you needing to do ‘extra mouse clicking’? I’m answering multiple threads much faster on this than on the old forum. I’m not sure how you can miss a ‘read the next new message’ approach, because the old forum didn’t work like that either - you just had the option to start on the latest page.
Aran: “View active topics” That’s actually where my bookmark for the forum takes me…
Sorry, not sure I’m getting you? The ‘active topics’ view is what the left-hand bar here mirrors…
Only barely.
What are the differences that you’re not happy about?
Aran: Yes, you always had an option on old forum to go to the first new message, which is what Susanna means, I think (i.e., the first message that you have not yet read in a thread). You clicked on the little red dot on a thread, and it took you right there. She’s saying the same thing I am.
Oh, no kidding?! Live and learn… So how many people knew about that and used it, I wonder? It certainly wasn’t default behaviour, and in the same way I don’t think it should be default behaviour here. Maybe we could squeeze a similar small icon on the bottom line of the previews, though.
That was my default behaviour, every time.
Er, I think Diane told me about it moons ago in Arianrhod’s Absolute Beginners Guide to the Forum. Lots of excellent tips were offered like that. I’ve used it a lot.