I am sure that you will not be surprised to hear that it was a rhetorical question
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No really I mean it.
That notice is correct as well as its position. It is indicating to you that there are new posts in topics you are watching or tracking.
The topics that end up in the watched or tracked lists are defined by the settings on your forum personal profile:
Edit these settings as you like.
You can check the list of topics you are watching and tracking with:
By visiting the topics you can change the status to Normal if you prefer through one of the two buttons that you find at the bottom of the topic and on the right timeline
I disagree. There is an unread indicator in the line above that does that and as I recall, always has. The new feature that appeared on Monday tells me about every new post irrespective of what it is. Given that there is a new post about once every minute or two, the behavior of the two indicators is markedly different.
Go to your preferences > categories, and check if there is anything filled in the fields there.
Or just disable live notifications.
[edit] Nevermind, it doesn't work.
This notice
is not a new feature, it has always been on all Discourse sites 
@pert can you confirm?
If not I have to ask my colleagues if that particular banner was hidden on Arduino on purpose.
I'm pretty sure something changed - I would have noticed it before because of the scrolling impact and the rapidity with which it reappears.
Also, since @Ballscrewbob doesn't see it, there's clearly something hinky happening. Maybe browser specific (I have Safari Version 13.1.2 (13609.3.5.1.5)) or of course perhaps Mods don't see it.
It would actually be a useful feature if it wasn't that it pops a new line (and corresponding rerender) when going from no new posts to one or more.
I don't know. It's the sort of thing I might just have instinctively ignored until now when I am intentionally looking for it.
Is the visibility controlled by one of the user preferences? I haven't seen it yet on this account, but I just checked with another and I do see it there.
Is there a forum setting that controls the feature?
I certainly don't get that pop up or msg.
Never seen it in any form.
You can only control what you need to be notified for but not the banner itself.
Interesting. One of our engineers did a rewark of the forum header, I don't know if this could have affected the notice. I'll notify the engineer so she can check it out.
@dax1
After adding and then removing a few of the main categories (Hardware, Software, etc.) to the "Watched" list, i suddenly got many topics listed under "Unread", some with last activity as far back as 11 May.
When i checked some of those, they were all set to "Tracking"even though i have only read them and didn't participate.
My setting to automatically track topics is on "never".
There is this on my "Unread" page:
By default, topics are considered unread and will show unread counts 1 if you:
- Created the topic
- Replied to the topic
- Read the topic for more than 4 minutes
Or if you have explicitly set the topic to Tracked or Watched via the
in each topic.
Seems like a bug to me.
Can anyone (non moderator) do a minor edit on any of my posts please.
You have my permission.
Want to test the new EDIT to make sure there is no bleedover to allow others to edit anything.
We may have your permission, but the board soft doesn't give its permission 
There is only a quote option shown.
I get quote and edit for my own posts.
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Thanks that's good enough for me.
Just needed peace of mind.
Correct.
I checked and there have actually been some changes.
First the banner was added to the categories page
and secondly we have received a bug report that we are fixing
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"googling" is the first error that anyone do.
And this is the second error.
You (not "you" personally, all you admins) have not used YOUR common sense (maybe looking about users preferences "before" make your choices ? 
) , you are just "googled" and accepted the opinion of someone you don't know (and that is very probably an incompetent) about what is the "better lenght" of a text line (for them, not for us), then, instead of "choose" that what can be the better for the users, just used a ready-made asocial-network (NOT forum) bad layout script.
Discourse is not a forum script, is an asocial-network script, the main problem is all there.
It's unfair, there is abundant documentation on what a human eye can grasp without causing fatigue, especially the larger the page. This goes all the way back to how newspapers are laid out and that's why columns were "invented"...
So instead of white space, why didn't we get columns is the question...Seems engineers stopped at the first information and did not go all the way to meet user's screen capability. One size fits all is typical of lazy engineers.
Are you serious in suggesting that columns should be used when showing a long post in the forum ?
It does not need to apply to post content.
I'm saying that one huge long page might not be the only option and that alternative layout to improve the site navigation when you have huge white space in your layout
we could have the various forums/categories/ topics on the left (or right for right to left locale) and then the list of posts and then the selected thread for example as they do in some views where we get 2 columns
this would appear only if you have enough space, responsive web site design...
What I don't understand is why people want to use a huge monitor on a PC to show the forum full screen. I only have a 23 inch monitor but whatever the layout of the forum I do not envisage using it full screen.
Currently the forum is in a window which is about half the width of the screen and there is no whitespace showing on either side. I am watching YouTube videos in the other half of the screen and can still be aware of new and unread posts on the forum as well as other moderator notifications
I am not saying that the current forum layout is perfect, far from it, but it is a given that we are not going to achieve a consensus amongst members
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