As some of you have noticed, we've had some technical problems recently. Last night I did a fresh installation of the forum software (a newer version, actually) on a different server (the same one the news site is on), and ported all of our stuff over. As a result, various things which were inaccessible are now working properly.
Most of this does not require much explanation, except to say that you might want to poke around in the settings again, because you might find things which interest you. However there is one feature which I'd like to point out explicitly, since very few people know about it.
If you go into your profile (the icon near the top with the box full of stuff), you should find three drop-down menus: Profile Info, Modify Profile, and Actions. Under "Modify Profile" you'll find "Ignore Boards Options". There you can check particular boards (i.e. categories) which you don't want to see anymore. Click "Change Profile", and posts in those boards will no longer show up in your "Show unread posts" queue.
The ignored boards will still show up on the home page... the feature does not control that. I find this somewhat regrettable, and may fix that at some point.
Two caveats:
1) Moderators who ignore boards will not be useful to us on those boards. That's not to say you shouldn't ignore boards, but if we don't have enough people monitoring a particular board we'll have to make adjustments.
2) I've been poking around the database, and may continue to do so. Don't regard your settings as private; if you ignore a board, I may notice. This is how I know, for instance, that we have only one person using this feature... and I think he set it before we had the problems with the templates.