Um, you do know this is two years old...
Actually I do, however I wish I had seen this earlier because it would have saved me some effort. Not a whole bunch, but I did not know of the existence of the pulldown menus at each of the arrow separators in the forum path listed at the top of the page which is a great feature.
I've just finished walking the entirety of every forum on all of Stardocks site's. I visited in excess of 700 forums. Of course I visited many more than once as they are accessible on multiple sites. I haven't yet put all the links into excel and sorted them but at this point I'm guessing that there are somewhere around 300 or so unique forums that an ordinary forum citizen can access.
I've also found that a significant number of "hidden" forums exist. These can be found and accessed in a couple of ways but their existence on any one site is not totally obvious. The result is that even though "hidden", posts in these forums will appear in the top level recent posts list and their source can be confusing.
Also one of the primary points of the referenced external article is that the recent posts list of any forum includes recent posts from all subforums as well. This would be great if it was true but unfortunately it's not. It is true that posts from all forums on the site (even hidden forums) show up in the top level recent posts list, but it is *not * true that the recent post list of any forum contains all posts from it's sub (or sub sub) forums.
A prime example of this are the GalCiv II forum and all of it's 17 subforums as shown in the following list.
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/162 GalCiv II
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/350 GalCiv II > AARs
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/421 GalCiv II > Beta Reports
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/274 GalCiv II > Bug Reports
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/357 GalCiv II > Dark Avatar
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/346 GalCiv II > Game Talk
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/247 GalCiv II > Ideas
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/253 GalCiv II > Ideas > Colonies
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/252 GalCiv II > Ideas > Diplomacy
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/248 GalCiv II > Ideas > Economics
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/250 GalCiv II > Ideas > Research
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/249 GalCiv II > Ideas > Trade
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/251 GalCiv II > Ideas > Warfare
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/345 GalCiv II > Metaverse
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/348 GalCiv II > Modding
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/349 GalCiv II > Off-topic
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/347 GalCiv II > Strategies
https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/483 GalCiv II > Twilight of the Arnor
If you want to view the recent posts from all of these forums you have to go into each forum one at a time and view all 18 recent posts lists.
Clearly posts from all of these forums *do* appear in the sites top recent posts list but so do many other "off site" forums. So much so in fact that the "off site" posts have outnumbered the GalCiv2 specific posts consistently on a daily basis for months now.
If the above described functionality worked as stated then if someone wished to ignore the "off-site" topics it would be simple to view only one forum's recent posts list (i.e. the GalCiv II forum) as that would contain all relevant threads. However without this function, to do the same thing requires monitoring potentially 18 separate recent posts lists.
Anyway, is there any possibility that the behavior as described will either be implemented, or if it has been implemented but is simply broken, be fixed, at some time in the future?