I went with the last two he did - the 'open' envelope is a little lighter in color, than the closed one.

You will have to clear any cached images, in order to see the update...

I think we're going to have to try and make sure we designate somebody around here as a "project manager" - there is just WAY too much coming in now (and most of it is absolutely verifiable and legit!!), but there is just no way I'm going to be able to continue prioritizing and managing all of these requests on my own. :(

Who do we want to put in charge of this? I can tell you, I've had no less than three people already, submitting LISTS (not one-offs, mind you!!) of things that need to be looked into and fixed around here, and I would really like it if we had one person (or even a few, so long as they are collaborating together on this) to consolidate everything, research and confirm if whatever issue is being reported is actually repeatable and not simply "user error", and then prioritize the list so things don't get lost in the shuffle.

I'll kick this off by nominating VGPolyglot

Anybody else have a suggestion? Does somebody want to start a thread, narrow down volunteers for this, and sort it out amongst the community???

I absolutely do NOT mind poking my head into the forums to see what's going and where bugs are getting reported, but it's definitely not the best way to go about things - and now that I'm getting closer to being caught up on what's driving the website and where, it would be a HUGE help if we had one point of contact to manage the workload...    

Maybe you could go start a new thread, calling for a "project manager"? 

Ok - the "orange" but never posted was a bug, it was never supposed to work that way. The ONLY posts that are supposed to color, are ones you were actively posting in. If you hadn't posted (whether you read or didn't read posts), it would be the black pencil. I fixed the bug so the orange would show correctly (you had posted, but there are new posts since).

I've now further split the black pencil for unposted threads into two categories - read them all (open envelope) or read some but not all (closed envelope).

If you want a quick and easy way to spot new threads... well that's kind of what the "latest topics" page is for

But....but....that would require me to actually make use of the new hover over the 'forum hot topics' feature....

Nah, thanks for pointing it out! It's much less of an issue on pc/mac anyways, but the colors were a nice way to take a quick peek and instantly know what's up, especially on mobile.

I actually really like the two new black/grey envelopes, it's more that the 'grey opened envelope' doesn't quite work how I'd like it to, since it reverts back to 'black unopened envelope' when there are new replies, making them, at a glance undistingiushable from entirely new topics. I'm sort of missing a 'read none'/'read some' distinction category here.

Sort of like this:

That would be a 'hey, there's new replies in this thread you've already opened', without being as attention grabbing as the bright orange that alerts you to new post in a thread that you're actively participating in.

But I disagree and I think plenty of people (including the dude who's in charge of all this ) do as well.

Maybe it could just be an alternate setting eventually?

Personally, I'm really happy with the way things are now. The only change I'd suggest is making it so threads you've opened (but not read entirely) also have the grey-ish background with the closed envelope, that way there's still a difference between new threads and ones you've already seen.