Being an admin myself I am visiting this forum almost daily searching for news and important updates relevant to my communities. I have noticed that my daily routine is always the same and looks like this:

In 99% of cases I click on my username (in the top black zone) and then I click o n the Content I Follow.

Only exceptionally I click on: My username - My Content. And that's it.

I never click on 'View New Content' nor the little 'droplet' icon next to it. Is it only me? If not, would it be useful to trace your behaviour on the board page, maybe we find that the most important functions are hidden and the less important ones exposed. I am looking forward to your feedback.

I have this board set to subscribe to all topics I post in.

I hardly ever view the forums in the traditional way to look for new topics, I mostly use the 'view new content' option for forums, blogs, market place and tracker. I also rarely go back more than 3 pages when looking for new content.

I always click on any 'starred' new content as it would be a topic I have already contributed in.
I only click on a new topic if it's title is interesting or relevent.

About once a week i will check 'my content' to see if there are any replies to my subscribed topics that i may have missed.

Other than that, I only search the forums if I am looking for specific topics that I am researching.

so the traditional way of board index > choose a forum > scan topics is something I hardly ever do. The only time I visit the board index is when switching between tabs and I click on the 'forums' tab. At that time I would also give the content side bars a quick scan to see if there was anything of interest to me.

regards
Richard

Ive gotta be the only one here that uses the quick-navigation, and actually browses.... mind you, yeah, ill hit my replies first... but yeah, i do use the quicknav.
heck... i want the documentation/community articles categories in there.... and dont tell me thats infeasible LOL.
The reason i like and use it...
I dont have to drillllllll down into the forum/category structure to get to a listing of topics and such.....
perfect example... from any single page of this forum besides already being at the documentation landing... it takes a solid number of clicks to get to the IPSMember docs..... not helpful.... and that is now that there's actually a link again.... which is appreciated, but could be superior IMO.

I have my browser set to land on the forum index. From there I scroll down the sidebar checking the blogs and then down to newest files. Then I hit VNC. Sometimes I'll check my content for new posts. Never browse the forum index.

I don't think I have ever clicked on Content I Follow. The content I follow I have set to email me when there's a reply, so before I even get here I check my email to see what I need to address. Once I've done that and am actually just browsing here, I do it almost exclusively through View New Content.

It appears a case could be made for making "View New Content" the default forum view instead of the forum index. Either on a global or per user basis.

I think I am one of the very few who actually just browse and see what I can find. I prefer doing that to be completely honest.

I seen myself going back to the very last page and viewing some random topics just for the history of it :)

I middle click all forums that I actively monitor to open them in new tabs, then I open the new topics in those forums in new tabs themselves. Once I'm done reading a given forum, I mark it as read, return to the board index, and start with the rest of the forums. Guess that means I use the 'traditional' browsing method.

I as well use the traditional browsing method, I go through forums looking for topics to read, have never once used VNC or anything like that on other forum platforms.