It's not "easier" - it's
reliable.
It's probably "easier" to grab a Glock
that you've stuffed in your underwear
by sticking your finger in the trigger guard,
but that's a good way to shoot yourself in the nuts.
I watch threads so that I can read new posts in them.
Until or unless I see it documented
exactly what causes
- the Alerts count to reset to zero, and
- yellow stars to wink out, and
- the Alerts pulldown to clear the yellow highlighting on new threads,
I have to assume that I get only one bite at the apple:
- One left click on Alerts
- One left click on Show All
With that kind of hot mess GUI design,
doing anything else risks missing a new post.
(Now in fact, when I click on Alerts when the number is 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5,
and I can see 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 items in the pulldown yellow-highlighted,
then I'll generally middle-click on each in turn (bottom to top),
to launch them in separate tabs. But if the number is higher,
then you can't see all the items in the Alerts pulldown,
and the only safe thing is to click on Show All.
I
think I've seen the yellow highlighting disappear from the pulldown items
(and the count clear) if I move my mouse off the pulldown, click elsewhere,
and click on Alerts again to bring it back. I certainly don't trust the NES software
further than I can toss a rack of servers not to clear that "unseen count"
and lose the "unseen map"; not without me seeing how it's documented to work.
If the truth comes out in this thread, swell. But I ain't got time to scour the site
(or some XenForo docs) to look for it...).
I usually just scan down the alerts using the drop down menu (not the show all) just looking for any quoted posts or questions someone may have asked me.
Today the icon showed 21 alerts, the drop down and the show all only revealed 6 of them. I did notice the yellow stars, haven’t seen that before, and assumed that was a recent alert. It’s possible the others were over a month old and just evaporated with time.
(I thought I'd posted a thread in this Tech Support subforum
asking for the yellow stars
to be made at least 3 times bigger.
It took me
years to notice them in the first place).
If you're just cherry-picking the alerts that look interesting,
or if some other way of using the GUI used to work for you,
that's great. I'm sorry that I don't understand the system well enough
to guess how you can have a count of 21, with only 6 items.
Given that I don't want to miss any alerts,
it
really sucks that I can't peek at the forums on vacation
unless I have the time to catch up completely.
A ski condo in Vermont with free WiFi? Sure.
The front porch of a public library in the Adirondacks? NFW.