How to traverse unread threads?

Here is a scenario: Being away for a while leaves me somewhat behind on postings, so I start at the oldest unread post. I contribute an answer, and clicks on the 'next thread' link ready to go the next unread post. But the forum says: "No newer threads exists". Which of course is true, since I just posted the newest answer...

Argghh... So I've found that to preserve the order of going from previous unread to next, I'll have to remember opening the 'next thread' in a separate window, before starting to answer the current thread. Sometimes I remember, and sometimes I don't.

1. How do you guys which read these forums regularly (or not so regularly) handle this situation?
2. Is it common to 'mark this thread read', and let unlucky people not getting a proper answer be just that: Unlucky?
3. Is it common to do, as I often do, open separate window with 'next thread'?
4. How do you get up to speed, when the list of unread is too long?

Is the scenario given a feature/bug, or just a bad user interface issue?

The same goes for where the unread thread starts. If I answer something I've answered before, then suddenly I've read all interemediate threads. And that's annoying.

Oh well, gotta stop ranting, and get some sleeps. But if you could share some light on how to get up to speed on unread threads in a proper way, I would be glad to hear of it!

Regards,
Even Holen

I go down the list in each forum that I follow, opening all interesting threads in new tabs (Firefox!). Just remember to hit reload before you answer each thread in a high traffic forum like php or someone will usually have beaten you to it.

--Simon

I do what Simon does - anything that looks interesting (or maybe something that may need deleting etc.) I open in a new tab. So I go down the forum and open all the tabs at once.



I don't use those links, I don't really want to read every thread, especially if it's in somewhere like the lounge.



You have to just forget the new threads. Dev Shed is constantly busy and you can't expect to be able to catch up with everything.

Once feature you could use is the new posts feature (which shows you the posts created since your last visit). This is quite nice, but in a huge forum like this, it's likely to be huge and you won't be interested in many of the threads in all the various forums.

same here!

I just back-button to the previously read thread that I didn't comment on... that's usually two back.

Then I hit the next-newest thread.

I have a bot that takes care of my posting for me