There have been a lot of changes to the way Discourse presents new information since the Gramps-Project started using their forum in 2019.
Initially, I was worried about having to actively check each category for new postings… which might lead to overlook messages. (The difference between push and poll. )
But the maillist mode provided a ‘push’ that ensured high visibility. And both the boldfaced Latest lists the count notification overlay on the avatar consistently flagged the same unread messages as the Maillist.
But in the last few months, some new postings have slipped through … the boldface on the Latest listing might show up a day late. The avatar notification started just tagging reactions and threads where I had posted… not all new reactions, postings & PMs.
Now maillist mode has become spotty.
We’re a fairly low-volume forum. There are not a lot of Categories, new user sign-ups, nor new messages posted on a daily basis. And this site is administered by the Discourse team as part of the free hosting for open source projects. New versions of Discourse are applied at the discretion of the Discourse developers. Which means we stay on the bleeding edge.
Maybe we’re seeing the effects of tweaks to the defaults to reduce excessive notifications for more highly actively forums?