Ok so 2 things initially. The top image ‘OpenEnergyMonitor’ should have the word community next to it to make it clear clicking this wil take you to the home page of the community unlike the ‘Home’ text link below that takes you to the OEM home page (grrr).
Secondly, when creating a new post, the categories selection box is already very busy and rather unclear I felt (as a first time user).I think usng tags to find specific ‘topics’ is a better form of navigation.
An Announcements category at the top would be good.
I liked the old sidebars with recent topics, active topics and blog posts showing.
As I said somewhere else (but could not find it again) using a touch interface and Win 10, the text box for post editing is obscured.
Another issue is that there is insufficient page below the ‘create topic’ button so the Firefox url status text is obscuring it as well. Moving a mouse over it causes this text to hide but that is not good for touch devices.
Now using this on Android 5 and Firefox. All looks OK and interestingly the input box moves up above the touch keyboard so the issue with win 10 touch must be a UA detection problem.
Only other thing is that it should definitely be categories by default.
Is there a more compact theme? I seem to be scrolling for ages as there is so much whitespace, and icons etc between posts. These would be better off to the side. The Discourse website seemed to have a more compact view for the list of topics in a category as well.
I have also been looking for a ‘mark all as read’ button without success. Have I missed it?
Topics automatically get marked as read once they have been read.
I will take a look at your other post regarding mobile view. It should like the site is not serving up its mobile version. Have you got different mobile browsers you could try? Or is there a setting to request mobile view?
I think mobile view can be manually selected via Discourse burger menu