I’ll make a comment that I have about forum usability that is chargeable to Discourse rather than to this particular implementation:
I find the Notification list format that Discourse uses bewildering. It doesn’t seem to function as I would expect it to, with a list of new posts, or a list of activities by other people that i might be interested in, since my last visit.
Maybe the issue is that the icons are supposed to be telling me something that I can’t figure out. But the real issue is that I’d like to “Dismiss” the notifications and thereby keep track of whether I had looked at them or not. Then, when I visit the forum, I could more easily keep track of what I’d like to go back and read.
But there seems to be no way to “dismiss” or “mark as read and get rid of” the old notifications in that dropdown, so I’ve stopped trying to use that and thereby don’t even make an effort to go keep track of things I’d like to go back and read if I miss it the first time.
If I am missing some setting that would change this behavior please let me know.