User blog comment:Mira Laime/New Page Header on Discussions/@comment-27938131-20170813202222/@comment-26339491-20170814193333

There will be a feature that lets you notify users about important posts, similar to how you can highlight threads in the forums. The post count is separate since it would have been very tricky to combine the two and present a number that makes sense. (What if your forum edits are transferred to Discussions, where there is no edit history and several edits can look like one, for example?)

Switching from a forum with separate boards to one continuous feed that shows all selected categories at once can take some getting used to, that's true. We're hoping that this will have an upside, too, though: You can see content from all categories at once and don't have to hop to separate boards to see what's new for all categories that interest you.