dave said:The system is designed to work this way and as best as I can see, it's working properly.

If you enter the forum (not a thread in the forum, but the forum itself where you can see the list of threads) then it marks the forum as read. The forum will not show as new again until someone makes a new post inside that forum.

Do threads with new content move to the top of the list inside the forum?

Yes they do.

That's what I thought. But yesterday (and before then too, but yesterday really got to me), the home page would tell me new posts in my watched forums, and I would open the forum to find the top several threads had no new content.

You might think I was simply hitting the back button instead of refreshing, but I always use the "home" button on my floating toolbar or the ATP logo on the top left center of screen to go home again, or I refresh. So ATP was apparently misbehaving yesterday, which is what led me to comment in this thread again.

OK @Dave, I think I figured it out. Just now, I refreshed ATP home page, and clicked on the Bar Codes? thread in my watched thread list. Clicked back to the home page (not using the back button), and "site talk" in my watched forums said "new." So I opened site talk, and there was nothing new. BUT... is that because I came into it via a watched thread and not via the forum link? As in, I clicked on "bar codes?" in my watched list, so it bypassed the main page of the forum that lists out all the threads?

(or am I really just hallucinating? heads back out to atp home to double-check)

fiwit said:is that because I came into it via a watched thread and not via the forum link?

That's right. The forum itself is only marked as read when you go into the forum and view the entire list of threads.

Visiting a single thread inside a forum is insufficient to mark the entire forum as read.

dave said:

That's right. The forum itself is only marked as read when you go into the forum and view the entire list of threads.

Visiting a single thread inside a forum is insufficient to mark the entire forum as read.

OHHH! I saw the same kind of thing and thought the same thing (It SAYS new, but there are no new posts). I never could figure out how to reproduce it.

Now I know. Thank you both!