personally speaking, i don't worry about subscribing to topics unless i'm specifically interested in them... not even for topics i start... what i do is to first catch up all subforums one time... from then on i do the following...
- always religiously use the "[New Posts]" link on the main page...
- i start at the end of those posts and read each of them by clicking on the little red square beside the topic's last poster's name right below the topic title...
- that takes me to the first unread post in the topic... if the square is not red, there are no unread posts and some posts may have been deleted or moved to another topic...
- while reading a post, if i write a response, i quote it, trim it to exactly what i'm responding to, and then submit it...
- then i ALT-BACK thru the pages until i get back to the list of posts in that topic...
- i read the next oldest post by clicking on the little red square for it...
- when i have finished a topic, i ALT-BACK to the list of new posts and move up to the next youngest one...
- wash, rinse, repeat until i get to the top of the list of new posts...
- at that point, i CTRL-R to refresh the list and any new updated topics show with the red aircraft so i go thru them as well always using ALT-BACK to return to the list...
- when i finish the list and there are no more red aircraft, i ALT-BACK again to the main forum page and refresh it... any red craft there indicate i've missed something or a new post has been written in the few seconds since i looked at the new post list... at that point, i click on the subforum title and scroll down through it looking for red aircraft or red squares... i follow the same pattern as above until there are no more red craft showing on the main forum page...
it takes longer to write the above then it does to actually do it... ALT-BACK and CTRL-R are my most used key sequences...
NOTE: ALT-BACK is really "ALT-left_arrow" or the browser's [BACK] button... since i'm a touch typist, ALT-left_arrow is the more common for me to use...
so now that i've written this post and previewed it with several modifications, i'm going to [Submit] it and then ALT-BACK five or six times to return to the topic and see if there are any more posts in it... if there are not, then i'll ALT-BACK again to the New Posts list and carry on at step 7
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."