I think it’s posting by replying to an email notification.
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Aha! I don’t use the email notification feature, so it’s alien to me. Thanks!
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There’s some discussion of it above in this topic, starting at post 126 (seven posts if I’m counting correctly—catch 'em all!). (Easy for me to remember it was there, because I posted something about it)
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Doh! I searched for the term “envelope”. Should have searched for 
instead.
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Are you on a mobile phone, then, I’m guessing? Because, I’m on a laptop, and when I hover over the envelope symbol (for example, in my own post #151 above), the hypertext says “this post arrived via email”.
But I gather (from other discussions) that mobile phones don’t show the hypertext? (I don’t use a phone for this kind of thing myself, so I don’t know.)
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Yeah, I am. Having bbs loaded on my laptop would be far too distracting for me.
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Not a huge deal, but. I just got notified about some replies to things I posted in 2013. (I.e., both the posts & the replies are from 2013.)
Then I saw this and wondered if some old residue was beflushed:
ETA: and then the notifications were gone… also that drop-down changed (at least on Android Firefox)
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I got a notification (from 2016) that I was quoted by OtherMichael—and at first for a moment or two I thought he was back—and now I has a sad. 
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Um, is it just me or did someone decide the site needed to be changed because I knew where everything was?
Is Microsoft in charge?
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Have these always been here?
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They’re new, part of the UI/UX changes.
More discussion here:
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No, and now, under my profile icon where I saw likes and replies to my posts, it appears broken.
It’s not behaving like it used to. I’m sure they work the bugs out unless my bugs are now features.
I can get used to changes but I’m always curious why things need to change when it was working.
It’s like everyone says our economy is broken if it doesn’t constantly grow, everything doesn’t need updating just because it’s been a while just like no growth is not failure.
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The discussion @gracchus linked to clears up a lot about the changes:
But since this seems like an equally good place to discuss it, after I got over my initial, “if it ain’t broke…” mentality, I find I’m kind of liking some of the new features.
I never really got the hang of navigating the site before. Like, I’d be confused about why the links to other threads showed up under comment threads as the next place to go. It never seemed to reflect my actual frequently visited threads. Now, with the categories thing set up, it’s really easy to get to where I want to be. And I like that each category is set up with the initial category descriptions right at the top.
And the changes are making me aware of functionality I didn’t know about, but was always here, like being able to archive old messages so it’s easier to keep the conversations I’m into easier to find.
I do wish there was a bulk archive functionality, though, because I have a lot to clean up.
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If you’re talking private messages, there is a bulk option. If you click the list icon, you’ll get checkboxes beside all your old messages, you can then select a bunch and archive them.
Something I do a lot, as you can imagine. 
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What is the point of archiving things like PMs if they reside on your servers anyway? It wouldn’t save memory from a user POV.
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It’s all about visibility. It lets me know what conversations are resolved and which are ongoing. Probably matters more in my case since a lot of PMs are “transactional” because their about a specific post/user/incident/whatever versus an ongoing chat.
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Yes, of course, I totally see how it would help you organize what must be chaos at the best of times!
I understand this part of it a little better now, thank you.
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Took me too long to see that there was a “dismiss” button under each section of your notifications, to bulk dismiss them all. Helpful for anyone, like me, who just got dozens of notifications about things that happened years ago. (Some as far back as 2014! I forget that the BBS was even around back then.)
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