What is the definition of a "New" post here?

What is the definition of a "New" post here?

I've noticed that clicking on the blue highlight to the left of thread names brings me to the middle of threads that I have never even looked at before. Today, I clicked on the blue highlight for a thread that I have posted in as recently as yesterday, and then accidentally discovered that it put me pages past the last post that I read yesterday. What good is it to go by someone else's definition of "new"? If there is only going to be one way of navigating to new posts, it should be "new to ME"; not new to someone who likes to converse in real time in a chat room. This current system is unusable, for making sure that you read all posts, as far as I can see. I could miss a reply to a post of mine that just got posted yesterday, because this site's code thinks that it's "old" news.

Is there a way to get to the first post that I haven't read yet? I don't mind some kind of signaling of how absolutely old or new a post is, but it should not be the basis of the only method available to explore what is new to ME.

Thanks. Glad to see you're aware. What about page numbers? They could help, too, even if one has to make scribble notes on what page they last read.

In the case I mentioned, clicking the blue button to the left of the thread title brought me somewhere, and when I went to the top of the previous pages, they had posts that I'd never seen before (and the time stamps suggest that they were posted since my last visit), so it looks like the code just skipped ahead. I suspect that what the code might be doing is limiting posts considered "new" to a certain finite number of posts. So if there are more new posts (new to me) than this number, it skips some. In less active threads, it seems to work better, but there are less "new to me posts" in those, so they may be under the limit.

The thread I've just lost all hope of keeping track of is the raw histogram thread, now heading towards 500 posts. I may have to start from the beginning again to see what I missed.

An interesting line of thought, but that isn't what I was thinking of. My experience with the raw histogram thread may be my fault. I've gone through the entire thread page-by-page, and I discovered that I probably forgot that I was at the end of the thread after posting something, and when I used the "Page back" button, I was looking at the future relative to from where I replied. That brings up another issue, though. One forum I am a member of always places your reply directly under the post you replied to, and that keeps you from hyper-spacing into the end of the last page. It stays there until you leave the page. That feature might be worth looking into, because there are probably few reasons why anyone needs to be at the end of a thread after posting.

Back to the scroll speed; it wasn't what I was talking about per se, but I've noticed that it isn't consistent. Sometimes you see the blue "New Post" box disappear shortly after it is revealed by scrolling, and sometimes it stays there after you have scrolled way beyond it and come back again.