awesomerobot

Never say never! There are various settings that can change this by site or account, but the defaults are:

• New: a topic that was created within the past 2 days that you haven’t opened yet
• Unread: topics you’ve already read that have new replies
• Unseen: topics you’ve never read at any point (hidden by default, a bit of a niche case)

The hope with the combined new is that the labels topics/replies are a little more intuitive than figuring out the difference between new/unread

Yes that was an intentional change. The idea being that if you’re creating an Events category with our new category creation flow that the category would be focused more on events than topics… but perhaps we need a setting that changes that default for cases like yours.

It’s completely independent from the boost feature (which is still experimental). By clicking “me too” you opt in to receive a notification when there’s a solution selected. If you used a boost to do that instead, you would not be notified when the topic is solved.

I imagine the name is meant to be sort of like “morale boost” you’re “gassing someone up” as it goes — this is essentially 1:1 with the basecamp flavor of reactions.

Yes, will 100% be optional

It likely varies significantly by site — there are cases where sites reduce the minimum post length which tends to create a situation where a lot of people end up replying with “cool” “love it” or whatever. Doing that with boosts allows for this sort of noise while occupying a little less of the discussion feed.

nope

It doesn’t bump the discussion, just sends the boosted user a notification that contains the boost content

just as likely as any other text input — if you click a boost it reveals a flag icon (maybe making this hover on desktop makes it more discoverable?), so it can be flagged and addressed like moderators like posts