Like Prawn Cocktail I 'Ignore posts' rather than mark as read. That way they don't come up again when someone replies to them.
That's what I do first. That often reduces remaining ones to 1 page. Then I look at any with which I might be able to help or may be of interest to me.
I didn't visit RC for several days last week. It disappeared from my "frequently used sites" as a consequence. Sunday morning, over a mug of tea, I clicked on an email notification of a reply to a topic. Then I looked at " Unread Topics" and found 5 pages. Ticked " Ignore topics" on first 2 pages. Returned to site on Sunday afternoon but this time by googling RootsChat. Surprised to find only 1 short page of unread topics when, by my simple arithmetic, there should have been 3 pages. Puzzled, I again accessed RC through my email notification as I'd done that morning and discovered 3 full pages of unread topics, the missing 2 and a bit pages having re-appeared.
I'm here just now via email link and there were 3 pages of unread topics which I have quickly reduced to 2.
