Without a tutorial to this site I canāt navigate it with any ease at all. Is there really nothing to read? I canāt even find a category called How To Use This or some such. I literally canāt figure out how to clear (delete) individual message notifications or badge achievements so there arenāt a bunch of old messages confusing me. I donāt know when Iām replying privately or to a thread. Iām lost.
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Pat type @discobot display help
A annoying robot will send you a message and help you navigate the forum. Some of the help is confusing so feel free to reach out and one of us will help you through the weeds.
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Hi! To find out what I can do, say @discobot display help.
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Haha, I canāt believe you summoned back the Demon, Rick 
I had forgotten completely about that!
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A quick (hopefully) overview.
Under the big banner you have four options to view the community.
Categories shows each and every section. (more below)
Latest is the most recent posts first.
Top shows the most active recent posts.
Unread shows posts that you are following but have not read since new posts were made.
There are two ways to reply in an existing topic.
To the topic in general - the big orange reply button.
To a specific post - the smaller grey button just under each post.
THe categories list is large though most is lesson specific, and they link directly from the main website too.
The first rows are for general guitar / introductory / community discussion in various sections.
Next to Social is the first of the lesson specific sections which then continue all the way down to the bottom, including theory, scales modules etc.
In your notifications (which show against your avatar) may be likes, replies, tagged mentions or direct messages.
shows a direct message
shows someone liked a post you wrote.
shows someone replied to you.
shows someone tagged you in their post.
If you type the @ symbol and without leaving a space write someoneās user name they will be tagged and receive a notification. It is a good way to alert people that you have mentioned or contacted them or replied to them specifically.
@Patthebunny for example
If you want to quote someone, use your cursor to select the part of the reply you want to quote and click the grey quote option. It automatically opens up a reply pane to start typing in.
I hope that helps.
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Richard, wow, what a fantastic overview! 
@Patthebunny hopefully this is not information-overload at this point, but there are some settings I recently discovered that helped me a lot. Before finding them, I was confused about how many of the blue circle notification/āindicatorsā on the posts worked.
To get there you can either enter this url by copying it and substituting yours in place of āusernameā:
āhttps://community.justinguitar.com/u/username/preferences/notificationsā
or you can click on your small avatar icon in the upper right corner of the page->āpreferencesā (head and shoulder icon)->Preferences->Notifications (along the left side)
Hope that helps, and please donāt hesitate to reach out for additional help!
This is a cross post because Iām totally wrecked for time and want to make sure everyone gets this. Thank you all for your help!c
Iām bowing out.
All my messages went to archive where I cannot figure out how to recover them, and I am already frustrated with this site, and that I donāt think using Zoom as is will work for me and etc etc. I went to preferences and thought if I hit the archive button it would take me to a page where I could choose from a menu which messages to get rid of. But no, it just dumped everything in the archive. I would normally cross post this message to the other topic but since I donāt know howā¦ Also, I canāt check the icon drop down to see if I can find some history somehow, or use any other method of referring to other posts while writing this one.
Iām afraid to hit the back button in case it deletes this message so Iām sending it. If there werenāt somewhat of a time limit to this and that I canāt get my setup done without learning how to use this site it would be one thing. But it turns out itās multiple issues to solve in the minimal time I can work on it. Thatās virtual life for you. Now Iām off to take care of my real life, relatively speaking. When I have a break Iāll try to get this straightened out.
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A single issue that maybe there is a single direct answer to:
Now that my messages have magically reappeared under my icon (is there a name for this button?) the next thing Iād like to know is how to delete things like badge notifications and individual messages. Iād settle for archiving if I can do them one at a time. But if this thing you call a ā what do you call it? ā will keep everything under the icon forever and maybe also in an archive, how do I not want to murder it?
Btw Iām not really enraged. But I am capable of murder.
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Ooh, lookit. I earned my first emoji badge! Kill me now. Or is there a badge for that?
Hi Pat,
What I discovered was if your writing a response and you want to have a look in the forum for another topic to cross reference you can navigate away from the post your writing on. Your message will still stay open. When you find the post and particular comment that you want to cross reference you can click the chain symbol for that comment (or if using web browser copy the webpage address to refer to the entire post). Then if you click on the orange title on your comment window it takes you back to the post you were commenting on to then paste the link to the cross reference post and continue your response.
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Hi Pat,
If you click on your icon symbol at the top right it will give you 4 options. The one with the bell is notification relating to posts. If you then click on the down symbol it will take you to a page showing all notifications. If you click filter it will give you option to view only ones that you have not read. Similarly, if you click on the envelope symbol it will show you list of recent Direct Messages. If you then click on the down symbol it will take you to the message page where you can then filter to unread.
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Pat
To minimise Notification after months of trial and error I found this to be the best setting but I still get the stupid badges (I just ignore them).
I then change the default landing page to Latest, so I see what has been posted since I last visited
What the platform sadly lacks is the ability to mark everything read, so you can clear the slate every now again. I am someone who likes things to be tidy and dropping into a Category and seeing bold unread post from months back is really irritating. The ability to set those to read would be an vast improvement but I do not think Discourse supports such an option, if I recall what was said in Beta testing.
No easy option to mark things as read bar opening the post, which Iāll do now and then on my mobile as its quicker than via a PC browser window but its still a Pita.
Hope the above settings make things a little clearer.
Cheers
Toby
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Hi Pat. I didnāt use the old forum so I canāt say this is equivalent to that, but there may be a lot more ongoing threads and more users around. From the comments I have read of members of the old forum at the time of the transition, this community site has a lot more functionality that come at a price of steeper learning curve to navigate it. Just be patient and youāll find your way. I did find the bot useful for learning to use the site but you need a quiet time to play with this automated tutorial. At this moment just ask specific questions and members of the community can help you.
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Been asking for this from pretty much day 1. There must be a way to do this.
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How about this? if you go to the unread button at the top of your list and hit dismiss which is at the top right. That seems to clear all the blue numbers, and if you you didnāt check the message, I think it should still care about what categories you like. @TheMadman_tobyjenner
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Phil
All that does is clear the notifications. The post remain bold ie unread.
Not sure what this means ?
Thanks for that, Toby! I had been looking for a way to set the default home page, and although that option is not as customisable as Iād like (Iād like to be able to set it to a URL for a specific category on the site), at least those few options are an improvement 
@Patthebunny I understand and empathise with your frustration for this site. I agree that it does have a fairly steep learning curve to master all the functionality.
To try to respond to some of your issues one at a time:
Iām not sure what the āofficialā name for that button is, but for sake of clarity here, Iām going to refer to it as the āprofile buttonā.
re: deleting messages: Assuming by āmessagesā you mean private messages from other users (is that what you mean?), I donāt see any way to delete those. As you indicated, you can individually archive them though. When I do that, those individually-archived messages no longer show up under my profile button.
re: deleting badge (or other) notifications under your profile button: I unfortunately donāt know of any way to delete or archive those. The only thing I know is that once I click on each one and āreadā it, the blue highlight on it goes away, so at least I know which ones Iāve handled.
As @Socio indicated, you can safely navigate away from your response to a post or message, and the system will keep it in draft form for when you navigate back to that post or message.
Please donāt hesitate to reach out with additional questions, either here or privately.
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Sorry, This was the message I was referring to, but it disappeared.
But as you point out it only deletes the count.
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