I should be seeing your answer in What's New , but I don't.
I'm OK with it, just confused a little.
If you visited this thread before you checked What's New, you wouldn't see this thread listed. Because you had already been here, aye? When you click on a thread's link, it is presumably done to read all the new content in a thread. The software sees you have visited a thread and the database clocks the visit and then shows the thread as a thread with no un-read content.
To flesh out what blyndgesser is saying, when you log into the forums and click on What's New, the resulting list is all of the threads on the forum you have not visited and all the threads that have had content posted to them after you logged out the last time. What's New might be a misnomer, because there might threads listed there which you have never visited, but were submitted months before. A more definitive name might be "Threads with content you've yet to view".
If you post a new thread, once you click to submit the thread, you are sitting on your submitted thread. You have visited the thread, so the database marks it as a thread you have read. It will not appear in What's New.
If you log out and I subsequently post to the thread, the next time you log in, the database will recognize I posted since you were last logged in and the thread will then appear in What's New. Until you visit the thread, after which the database will have the thread marked as a thread you have read. When you click on What's New, you see threads you have never visited and threads with new content since you last visited. And those results are particular to your account, so your What's New results will generally be different from what other users are seeing.
The What's New function works differently on different forum platforms. So differently, in fact, I rarely (as in never) ever use the function. When you are on the forum home page, there are two different icons displayed to the left of each forum -
This icon indicates the forum has posts you have yet to read. Suddenly (for me), the What's New function is just something that requires an extra click, to drill down to new content. Why click on What's New, when I can click on the forum?
This icon indicates the forum contains no new content.
If the light's on, there's new content, and if the light's out, there's no new content.
If you visit a forum with new content, the new content will always be at the top of the stack and the titles of the threads with new content will be in
Bold Text, with this icon appearing to the left of each -
Some people prefer to use What's New, whereas I find it really inconvenient to go back to it, in order to find fresh content, what with all the visual clues provided. Different strokes for different folks.
Comme ci, comme ca.