@sjelso
as Djenson and others have said, you can turn stuff off with the ignoring thingy. The Forum games are turned off by default. What I’ve found to work best, is to click on the blue unread icon and then hit on the sidebar which shows which ones i might wanna read. When I click one, it takes me to the last post in that thread and I scroll back.
If I haven’t read anything in that thread, I click on the topic and it starts at the beginning.
A neat feature is the “mark all as read” thingy. After I read or check on things I’m interested in, I hit that, and it whacks all the other posts.
Anyway, while not perfect, I think the new site does have some valuable options. Mainly being able to turn off all the Forum games. It also seems as if the nodebb guys are actively working on making things better, so I would imagine there will be improvements too. : )