True about Google search for the unpaid boards, but Google could not access the premium side. It was kind of ironic that the paying customers were the ones being short changed.
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You are not getting it. I donât WANT to scan through Mungoâs recent activity. Or Elanâs or MapGâs etc. I want to glance over a list of ~50 posts on a board (note: not every board, just the board/topic Iâm currently looking at) and identify posts by certain authors and/or by high rec (like) counts.
The way it works best is the way the old boards did it. Hereâs an example from the old board:. Concise, easy to quickly eyeball scan. (The full screen has 50 lines. 50 posts)
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By Jove, I think you are getting it.
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It never occurred to anybody to keep the existing members while ALSO attracting new younger members?
We will see ina couple years if they made the right choice.
I doubt that. More like two months. Or 2 weeks.
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Oh great. I just made a reply to a post and it positions me at the bottom of the thread, to my reply! Hey, I want to stay where I was, so I can read the other replies.
Another site I read has the same issue, but there I can click âopen reply in a new windowâ, and they close that new window after submitting the reply. The original window stays right where it was, so I can continue reading from where I left off.
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Oh, great. It wonât let you make 3 replies in a row.
Is there an emoji for skrew that? (Had to misspell to get past the censor.)
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Well, that didnât work. Turns out my reply was to message #16, my reply came in at message #21.
Soooo, #17 was my first unread, and I figured that when I clicked on unreadâs it would take me to #17. Nope. It took me to the bottom (msg # 24).
Post numbers 18 & up just disappeared from my sight.
Worse and worse.
Donât get me wrong, the features here are pretty good. Editing your post, formatting options, being able to uploadâall good.
Where it falls down is the navigation. Falls down hard.
Yeah, complaining about the free ice-cream. But when the free vanilla ice-cream changes to dirt-flavored ice-cream, thatâs not good.
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I donât believe that was possible. For example, the old boards had no quoting at all. Yet you complain that nested quoting doesnât work perfectly here on the new boards. 
For example, the old boards had no quoting at all. Yet you complain that nested quoting doesnât work perfectly here on the new boards.
Well, it did. Sorta. Cut/paste and enclose it in < i > tags worked for most people. Or you could just enclose it in double quote marks. Anyway, that was just a comment, not a complaint.
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I donât believe that was possible.
Sure it was possible.
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BTW, I still havenât managed to get links to my favorite boards over to the left sidebar. Somebody said hover on TAGS and click the pencil. I did that, and was able to add Berkshire, but thatâs all. In the Tags Section I click on the + and it expands to optional tags advanced-micro, washington, disney, apple, and micron. Thatâs it. Now, I know that there are more than 6 stocks.
I think youâve hit the core of the problem. This new board system doesnât support the way you (and I) like to browse through posts. The guy who designed this discussion board software doesnât like to read boards that way, so no one should like to read boards that way.
You and I basically have two choices on this. We can adapt to the change, or we can bail. I have chosen to at least attempt to adapt before I bail. I cannot blame you if you choose to leave. I havenât fully decided to stay, either. Iâm just taking it a day at a time.
âPeter
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Where it says optional tags - type in the company want and then select it. Then click on the page somewhere away from the drop down that stupidly covered the Save Changes button and click Save changes. That will add it.
But remember, on the free side, the company boards have very little activity so many were closed last spring. There are only about 60 over here. On the subscription side, they are more active and there are about 800,.
I have some very cynical thoughts on that. Iâve expressed them once, and Iâm going to stop at that. The gist is that us old fogies are expendable.
Yep. Poor design, IMHO.
Where it falls down is the navigation. Falls down hard.
Big time. Once again, itâs back to the board designer. This navigation method is the one he thinks is best, so it must be best for everyone else, too. His way is the only right way.
Another fail. You have to search through the tags. And sorry, scrolling isnât the right way. You must type the first few characters of a name to find it. Because its my way or the highway.
As to your favorite boards, I wrote this up. Maybe it will help on that front.
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Iâve created only one tag, that on the Premium side. Iâm getting along pretty well following Tracked, which is under Community at the top of the left side-bar. Tracked was initialized with our Favorites when the change was made. When I select Tracked it limits the view to just those boards. I can use the Filters (Category, Tags) and the Latest/Unread/New choices to control what shows. Mostly I just use New to keep current.
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Just so you know, those tracked posts arenât everything thatâs going on. You can be missing a lot of activity on your favorite boards if that is the only place you look.
âPeter
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(Not a solution â there probably isnât one-- just a side comment)
I share a lot of the frustration that everyone is going through. The way we used to get an overview of messages on our favorite boards doesnât seem to fit in the model of the ânewâ and improved boards.
To me this is a bit like the transition from the command line user interface to GUI interfaces long ago. If you were an expert (or even just happy) with the command line a lot of the GUI stuff just seemed to get in your way because you knew what you wanted to do and just to type it. Hunting around for hidden ways of doing things seemed ridiculous.
IMO, TMF bungled the transition, somehow thinking that all the new good stuff was going to over shadow the few severe shortcomings of the new model. In time it probably will, for most people. It is sad that we will lose a few top posters over this.
Mike
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Tracked shows you all the activity from the categories or tags you are tracking - new topics and unread replies in existing topics.
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Thatâs the theory. In practice it doesnât work that way. Iâll pop up a couple of screen shots next time I notice it. Which shouldnât take too long. I just have to wait a couple of hours for a few posts to build up.
You might be able to check for yourself. Take a look at the list of tracked posts. Make note of one of the boards categories those appear on and how many topics are included. But donât read any of them. Instead, navigate directly to that category and look for yourself at the unread topics over the last day or so. Unless you have been faithfully checking and reading, there will be unread topics in a category you are following.
âPeter
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Iâve been active since the boards came back, on both sides. I am not missing anything by following Tracked. Not missing anything on my old Favorites that is, or new stuff I have marked at Tracked. Yes, the counts are unreliable, so I treat them as minimums. It would be better if they were correct, but I can live with that because I know about it.
Perhaps that is why it works for me. I have been keeping pretty close to up to date. But I donât think so.
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Well, that didnât take long. So hereâs a bit of background. These are the boards included in my tracking:
Youâll note that include METAR (which Iâve highlighted)
Here is the current list of tracked topics:
Youâll note only one topic on HWTSC.
Lastly, here is the full list of topics on METAR:
There are two topics there, including one that is more than half an hour old. That should be plenty of time for any caching issues to clear. Youâll have to trust me that I took these screen shots about as quickly as I could navigate from place to place.
Clearly, there are unread topics on a board that I am tracking that do not appear in the list of tracked topics.
Iâm open to the concept that Iâm doing something wrong here, or Iâm not understanding something about how these boards work. If thatâs so, thatâs fine.
âPeter
Peter, I think there is a difference between âunreadâ and ânewâ. Try finishing reading all the unread posts (or Dismiss then), then check out the sidebar. Mine changes to â17 newâ.
I just tried an experiment. I started at the basic discussion.fool.com page. I made sure there were not filters. I selected Latest. Then I scrolled down looking for unread messages. The ones I found were all topics I skipped or did not have as Favorites. I kept going until everything was from the old system, which covers everything on the new system so far. So I havenât been able to reproduce your experience.
Yet. 
I think @5761796E65 nailed it here @ptheland, note that in your image below there is one unread message Unread (1) and in the top menu at the left of that there are two new messages New (2).
Now can that be confusing? Absolutely.
If you dismiss or read your unread topics the sidebar is going to show you New (2) and will take you to the new topics page. As I said before the sidebar is a new feature so I expect that it will evolve and the user experience will improve over the time. Even with itâs flaws we still felt this was the closest we could get to our old favorite boards feature so opted to include it.
OK. I do see that behavior.
Next question. Arenât new topics by definition unread? It seems silly to me to differentiate here.
Let me see if I understand this. Is it that ânewâ means a topic I have never read, and âunreadâ is a topic that I have read but has new posts on it?
I think youâve nailed it.
âPeter