Reading replies

If you click on the alarm-bell at the top right of any message board screen, you can choose to receive notifications when someone replies to a thread you have posted in.

Also, you are not automatically subscribed to threads here by posting in them (unlike most other message boards). In order to be subscribed you have to hover over the star in the upper right hand corner - same line as the thread title - and click it. Once you do that, you're able to click the star in the upperMOST right hand corner (the one next to the bell icon) to see which of the threads you've subscribed to have new responses. Lots of people don't know about or use this feature, so threads get abandoned unfortunately.

I actually don't know that the notification system tells you if someone replied to a comment of yours (like other types of boards) or just replied in a thread you've asked to be notified about. It's not that intuitive, but you get used to it.