Shoutbox

I browse the site the same way and raised this issue with WDZ a while back in the shoutbox (a long while it's likely pruned by now) and he explained that this was because of the way that the forum checks for unread threads. It made sense and when I bought up another possible way to check he seemed to acknowledge the idea.... before doing nothing about it

But fair enough it would be a lot of effort to make a change with little result.