In all other forums I’ve used the number shown within parenthesis in the page title shows how many notifications and new private messages you have. Here it shows new unread topics.
This number shown is quite arbitrary since it only shows the number of topics that has been created since you loaded the page, not how many unread topics you have. Also I find it quite stressful to see that number. I always think someone has written something to me and hurry back into the tab to see what it is, only to discover that it wasn’t for me. This actually often makes me close the Sketchup Forum tab as soon as I’m not actively browsing the forum, when I could instead have it constantly open.
@eneroth3,
I’d not thought about that before, but now that you mention it, I’d spend a lot less time obsessively staying “up to the minute” in our forum if the number in the tab reflected notifications instead of new/updated topics.
I’d been meaning to join the forum for Discourse for quite a while, and I took this opportunity to re-ask your question over there (with my own phrasing).
I’ll report back any definitive information I receive.
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Very interesting! I just filled out my Discourse profile for two other Discourse hosted forums (Discourse and cz.nic) and both had this:
Yes - that’s right - you can suppress the number on the tab! And I’ve checked to make sure we have that option on our profiles in this forum.
Not quite what @eneroth3 is looking for as it doesn’t allow a way to show notification count, but it does what, to me, is more important: eliminates the distraction of checking the page every time a number appears!
Edited to correct bad assumption 5 Nov 2016!!!
I thought I’d found a setting that would suppress the count. Silly me. It turns out that this option changes where you see the count, but doesn’t suppress it! Unchecked, it shows the count in parenthesis in the title text. Checked and it shows the count superimposed on the icon to the left of the title:
So, as it turns out, there is not currently an enabled option to either suppress the count completely or - as @eneroth3 wants - an option to count notifications instead of new/modified topics. 
Overtaken by events - removing bad information based on bad assumptions. (Or should I just delete this?)
Overtaken by events (or should I just delete this? – See edits)
It makes me surprised if this is by design. To me it’s an obvious bug 
.
Just for comparison, here’s the browser tab for my gmail (I’ve blurred out my email address):
I like that the number in the title text is after the title - means that if I don’t want to see it, I might be able to hide it by opening enough static page tabs to squeeze the size down so it isn’t shown. Not optimum, but at least doable. Not so much for a Discourse forum’s count in the title.
I don’t like that it’s shown in the icon and in the title. Choices! I want choices!
Hey! I finally got some activity in the thread I started over on the Discourse Forum!
So far, two of the founders have chimed in. One likes the idea, the other made one comment referring to options only being worth providing if the problem it’s trying to solve is an “irreconcilable difference”. Frankly, I was a bit put off by this comment - I’m not sure if the commenter was being serious or sarcastic. Consequently, I’m not sure how to respond. Is anyone here familiar enough with the Discourse Forum to give me some direction?
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