Not sure this is the place for it, but nothing else seemed much better, so here it is:
When I’m gone for a few days, and I want to catch up on reading, I see a thread like the “What’s Happening in YOUR Randomly-generated Apocalypse?”, and I know that I’m going to be a page or two behind. The forum software shows the pages as “1 2 3 … 595” or somesuch.
When something is more than 4 pages long, I’m most likely to start either at the beginning or at where I left off (right near the end, hopefully). Pages 2 and 3 and the LEAST likely pages I’m ever going to start at, pretty much EVAR, while pages 593 and 594 (in the example given) are going to be quite common.
Any chance there’s a setting to fix that derp somewhere?
Interesting tidbit, you can click the … to expand it out. Probably won’t help you any, but I would have never known if I hadn’t noticed the little hand over it one time.
Also you can follow the link near the top left of the page that says “show unread posts since last visit”, which gives a meta-view of all threads that have updated since your last visit, and follow each of their “new” links.
Near the bottom right of THAT page there is a button that says “all unread topics”, which doesn’t try to be smart, it just lists every thread that have had posts added that you haven’t seen. That page is almost exclusively how I read the forums.