Just something I have been wondering for the longest time, but only now I actually am going ahead and ask: is there a way to see the new posts and topics since our last login?

If not, would it be possible to have it in some way?

I am asking this given that this is probably one of the only forums where I don't see this functionality anywhere (at least as far as I saw), and something akin to what you already have in your RSS feed:
http://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?action=RSSrecent
but as a button in the top menu (just like "Board Index", "Help", etc) would be very useful, given that right now in order to know about what has been going on lately is proving to be troublesome.

Thank you for looking into this. 

Yeah, many forums also have icons to show read and unread sections, but overall at least I don't even look at them, because you may have many sections and try to figure out which sections have unread stuff, and then enter each one individually to then see the list of unread posts in each, is a big pain.

What I mean exactly, if you have an account in some phpBB forum you're active on, or even the vBulletin ones, generally you can see a link with "New posts", where you click and you see a complete list of the new posts that were made while you were logged out.

It makes it easy to browse all the actual new posts very fast, and to not miss any posts.

However, this forum seems to be written in Perl and using a software I never saw before, which quite honestly seems a bit outdated to me, but after a quick search at least, I didn't find a way to do that either.

However that "recent" list you just posted is actually very close to what I meant, and perhaps for the time being close enough to use that one instead. 

So I checked the URL, and although it's returning only 10 entries, apparently it's capped at 25 (I tried 100 in the URL just for fun).

Therefore, I am not sure about the amount of control you have in the menu at the top (the one with the "Board Index | Help | Search | ..."), but if possible, you could add a new entry called "Last 25 posts" or something similar and use this URL:
http://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?action=recent;display=25

It seems that "recent posts" or "recent topics" yields the same results.

If you cannot control that menu, maybe you could put it somewhere else? I don't know...

The problem with that is that I am still left to actually have to look at every single section with an unread icon, and then look at every "new" tagged topic within each one.

That implies entering each section and leaving it, which is not efficient especially due to how browsers work (cached page with unchanged icons upon "back"), or to have multiple tabs for each section to see then each topic, and the thing is, I am a simple guy, I prefer simple iterations when checking things as a regular human being, and leave recursion for machines.

OK, thanks.

I wasn't exactly implying that you should move to another system btw, with the current traffic and active user base, it might not be even worth the effort for the time being, and it fulfills its purpose nonetheless.

It was mostly to highlight the fact that nowadays forum software in Perl is not exactly up to date, like this one, so useful things like this are generally not there, although the obvious PHP forum solutions such as vBulletin and phpBB do not really have what I would like to call "good code", it's still very PHP4.x-ish and open to security problems when PHP is already at 7.2.

Either way, I will probably bookmark the link with the latest posts instead for the time being, which for now seems to be good enough.

Smirftsch wrote on Feb 2^nd, 2018 at 2:22pm:

I can guarantee that half of these are just me checking this forums and a few sites constantly because I have nothing else to do.

I updated an existing mod for an older version and now there is "Unread Topics" in the main menu bar on top. Please test

Hm... I tried the "Unread Topics" button ...but all it's doing is telling me that I have  84 Unread Topics. But nothing is shown there.