Can somebody please explain the following about the TidBITS-TALK home page:
- What does it mean when a title is grey (vs. when it is black)?
- What does it mean when a white number in a light blue circle appears to the right of the title?
Black means you have never clicked on that thread before. Gray means you have. It’s just your browser telling you you’ve visited this link before vs. not.
White number in blue circle I’m not sure, but I bet @ace will pop in here shortly to set us both straight. I am aware of a little blue circle next to a thread indicating new posts since you last visited the thread.
One link I find very useful (and I’m not sure it’s prominently advertised on the site) is
https://talk.tidbits.com/?state=watching
which shows you all threads you have selected as ‘watching’, i.e. you posted there or you’re interested in following (per the selector at the bottom of any thread).
At the top of that list is also the very useful link
https://talk.tidbits.com/latest
which lists all active threads, also with a divider line since your last visit. A quick and simple way to check up what’s new since you were last here. Enjoy! 
Unrelated: @ace, how do I get an indent in a post? Leading spaces get omitted and hitting tab moves my focus to Safari’s URL field.
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I think a plain blue dot indicates a new thread since you last visited. A number in a blue circle means it’s a thread you have previously read, and the number is the count of new messages since you last read it.
The dots and circles don’t automatically vanish when you read the thread, but if you reload the page after that, they will not show up.
Like this?
That’s not an indent, but entering a few times. That is the HTML code for a non-breaking space. Which can be a way to annoy people who are strident about using a single space between sentences.
It appears that if you wrap text in HTML unordered list tags (<UL>…</UL>), that will indent a paragraph. There won’t be any bullets if you don’t also have a list-item (<LI>) tag in it.
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Other mechanisms I tried (e.g. embedding CSS code in HTML object tags) doesn’t work - DIscourse filters them out. And its BBCode module doesn’t support BBCode’s paragraph-alignment keywords.
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I think that’s right, but since I’ve read everything right now, I can’t easily check.
The decoding that I would like to see is for each person to click the Reply button under the post to which he or she is replying, rather than clicking the Reply button at the bottom of the thread. Unless I’m misunderstanding the interface, this would make it clear which is the post of interest, rather than making subsequent readers guess at the flow of the conversation. As an example, see AT&T Joins T-Mobile, Verizon in Deploying 5G Home Internet - #4 by julio and AT&T Joins T-Mobile, Verizon in Deploying 5G Home Internet - #5 by julio, which appear to have been started by clicking Reply at the bottom of the thread. In defense of Julio, it is fairly clear what posts prompted his responses, but that isn’t always the case, and there was no reason that I can see not to click Reply under the post to which he is responding.
In the case of this post, I am not replying to any other poster’s comment, but to the topic of the thread, so I clicked the Reply at the bottom of the thread. Am I misunderstanding something?
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No, you’re absolutely correct. The gray Reply button under a post links the reply to that post, whereas the blue Reply button at the bottom of the topic makes a general reply. Alas, there’s no way to enforce this.
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