Thanks to a currently maintained plugin I found unread topics since the last visit are now marked with an icon before the title. If you don’t like that at all you can disable that on your user profile. Scroll way down to find two radio boxes to “Display unread icons” and “Do not display unread icons”. It may not be accurate yet and instantly label all as unread as there are not records stored yet.
This is a great addition which I’ve been craving!
For those who have already read every thread in this forum, it might be useful to click “Mark all topics as read” just ONCE, and then all subsequent threads with new replies will now have that black dot next to it.