My unread count jumped from about 40 to 603. Was there a lot of posts in the night?
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If I had to guess…one of your Category tracking notifications changed.
I accidentally had one of mine set to something less than full viewing, and when it shifted I wound up with hundreds of unseen posts too.
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If you made any changes to your profile or your notifications preferences, that could effect your numbers.
Also, some of us have been going back to much older posts and replying to them. That would definitely bring your numbers higher.
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I did change some settings a few days ago. That gave me about 60 unread, which went up and down as I read them but this morning it jumped to 603.
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When you look at the Unread list, are there a lot of new listed topics or just a couple with large number blue dots:
Also, how does the Categories look to you:
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There are hundreds of blue dots, many with big numbers in them. Categories shows numbers which add up to 600 ish. Perhaps one of the settings took a few days to kick in.
What do grey dots mean? Some topics have both grey and blue.
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Blue refers to new postings in those topics since you last logged in, grey means that number of posts in that topic that you had not read (by scrolling back up) even though you might have looked at some of those postings when they were new.
Whatever your setting changes where, as people have gone back and posted to much older dormant topics, you are now seeing the dozens (if not hundreds) of posting numbers from those.
Currently, there are somewhere around 73,000 postings, but I can only find around 67,000 for myself.
EDIT: When you position you mouse over different parts (dots, names, times and settings), you tend to get an explanation of what it is or what it is trying to tell you (unless you have aggressively locked down your browser and/or computer with security changes/software.
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I changed my settings because I noticed some threads were bold but had no dots on them. When I clicked on those I realised I had read to a certain point and then stopped following.
I changed the settings that says “Automatically track topics I enter to 30s”. I think it was 2 minutes before.
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The dots are tied to the Tracking.
The Settings under your profile are diverse, but I find them to be “odd” at best (some of mine are as follows:
Here is how it reports them, but setting them seems to occur is weird places:
The help feature is sometimes within the community.glowforge.com and other times takes you to the meta.discourse.org site/
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Found this from the Discourse site:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/whats-the-difference-between-tracking-and-watching/5430
A bit long, but it does get replies from Discourse developers (and even the co-founder).
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Hey, hey, hey! You talkin ta me? 
(I actually just did the same thing - realized I had about 756 Unread topics, so trying to catch up. Missed a lot of awesome posts and I’m kind of ticked off…i thought i was keeping up with the latest and greatest.)
Had the settings wrong on the individual Categories, even though they were set for total notification in my Profile settings.
So no, it wasn’t me this time…ROFL!
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Hope that was 756 unread posts not Topics.
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Topics. I’ve increased my post count read by over 5500 posts this morning. (granted by skimming most of the comments, and some of them were pretty cute too, but I don’t want to necro.)
Can’t believe how much of the forum I’ve been missing.
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I’ve not checked my counts, but there is no doubt I’ve been missing a lot with my previous settings.
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I’m finally down to 197 unread posts after the holidays, I think it was in the 300 range before.
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For me it is topics with unread posts, currently 583. I don’t think I will ever catch up.
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I’m currently at 1109 unread… Every once in awhile I’ll go to the bottom and try to clean some out, but then everyone just keeps posting more!
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Ack! I’m so sorry that I read this thread. Adjusted my settings, and now I have 700+ unread. The OCD part of me thinks I need to correct this. The sane part of me is trying to stop trying to catch up.
Guess which part is winning?
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I currently have 1291 unread. I’ve been reading all day after adjusting my setting and the number was holding at about 100. Took a break for a couple hours and now I have no idea how long it will take to get caught up with all of these 
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