Further RSS issues

My saga with RSS continues. As I stated before, changes to MySQL's forum site led me to pursue using an RSS reader as my main interface to the forums. That worked quite well until recently. My only issue had been that the various replies to a post showed as separate entries to the reader, with no connection between them. Coming back from a self-imposed hiatus, I find that this problem has been fixed, at the expense of creating another one. Now, each thread shows up once only in the reader, along with an indication of how many replies have been posted. This is fine, except that the thread is not marked as updated, and so threads that get replied to are never highlighted as unread by the reader. This of course makes it extremely difficult to conduct timely and efficient interactions with someone on the board. I now have to peruse the forum web page with the thread list looking for new posts, an error-prone procedure supposedly eliminated by the reader, which had been popping up little notes on my screen when someone replied.

I have enjoyed helping out on the boards in the past, and intend to do so again, however without a foolproof automatic means of being notified of new replies, this rather puts a crimp on my activities.