Can the forum software support how I would like it to work?

I gave up on reading Usenet new 20 years ago as all newsreaders assumed the every message posted was of equal interest to me and that I had tell it not to display a thread if I didn't want to see it. Given the vast deluge of threads, though, this proved unwieldy.

I find all forum software follows the same illogic.

My personal preference is for forum software to allow me to select which forums I want to follow and ignore the rest. For example in the e-book readers section I would like only the Kobo section to appear. I don't have an iRex, or whatever it's called, any I probably never will so why should that forum always appear? Any forum I don't want to see I'd like to turn off.

Within the list of threads in a forum I would like only the following threads to appear:

1) new threads created since my last visit
2) threads that I subscribe to. I would no longer have to manually block a thread from appearing because it by default won't on my next visit.

That's it. Easy. Information I would like to have and only the information I would like to have.

[montsnmags]

These are some options which may enable you to peruse the forum while limiting the amount of information that shows:

• At the main page of the Forum (<---linky) you will see on the right of the darker blue bar for each main section there is a "-" sign. If you click on that, it will collapse the section. This will not work for the subsections (eg. under E-Book Readers you will not be able to collapse all the sections for those devices you don't want to appear)
  
  
• If you are perusing the forum via the "New Posts" pull-down menu appearing on the darker blue bar at the top, you can exclude forums from the results. This is done via the User Control Panel/"User CP" (<---linky) which you can see just to the left of the "New Post" pull-down menu. Under this section are many items to customise the forum experience, including the item, "Edit Options" (<---linky). At the bottom of this section is the "Forum Exclusion" sub-section, which lets you exclude as many of the forums and sub-forums from the "New Posts" results as you wish.
  
  
• Under the "User CP" section again you will note that it will show "New Subscribed Threads" on the right. This shows if there have been any new posts in any threads you have subscribed to. Clicking on the little blue square with the down arrow in it, to the left of each thread title, will take you to the first new post since you last went to the thread. If you want to check all of your subscriptions, read or unread, there is the menu item on the left of your User CP called "List subscriptions" (<---linky) which shows you every thread you've subscribed to (by default in last post descending order, though you can click on a column's heading to change this)
  
  
• Also in the User CP are the "Edit Ignored Threads" (<---linky) and "Edit Ignored Users" (<---linky) options to check any threads you've "Ignored" or users you've "Ignored". You can "Ignore This Thread" from the "Thread Tools" menu within each thread, and you can just add users at the menu item specified. These may be less use to you, as you indicated in your first paragraph.

I don't think there is any means of removing from the main overview of the forum any sub-forums you don't wish to see (aside from the first item above, for the main sections). If you do use, or now elect to use the "New Posts" pull-down menu to monitor new posts (with sub-forums excluded, as specified above), you may find that to be a solution for filtering out stuff you do not wish to see. (A small note that, as with your "List subscriptions", the little blue box with the down arrow in it, next the each thread heading, should take you to the first new post since you were last in the thread).

I do not know any means of just seeing new threads created since last visit.

Cheers,
Marc

Thanks for the extensive reply. I had excluded sub-forums from the "New Posts" but never really got around to seeing whether or not "New Posts" was useful.