Sung to the tune of These were a few of my favorite things about the old forum. Maybe we could get them in this new forum?
All threads in one place, irrespective of category, sorted by thread with the most recent post.
Hovering over the "last post" showed you snippets of the post.
Basically, the layout that greeted you when you went to your bookmark Nth Circle - Forum - maybe there's a way to view the current forum in that format, I don't know.
Thanks if you can incorporate these suggestions. They'll make this forum more attractive and more readable, IMO.
If I understand your meaning: At the top of the main listing, select All Categories, All Tags, and "Latest" gets you the first part, I think, but not the hover-display snippets. In your preferences under "Interface" you can set "Latest" as your default home page. I don't know if the snippets can be supported in Discourse or not.
For your first and third points, I think the forum already does that. As scriptninja already mentioned, the Latest view should show you the latest posts regardless of category. There does seem to be an edge-case bug though, where the ordering of some posts can be wrong, but that should happen only rarely.
For you second point, I've looked into it and it appears to be a limitation of the software platform, to only display "excerpts" for the the original post. I agree though, it'd be nice and more useful to see excerpts of the latest post. I'll see about putting in a feature request for that or even consider if that's something I can develop myself, if/when I can find the time.
These were a few of my favorite things