I’m still learning my way around Discourse. Y’all can post info as you figure stuff out.
I was just trying to figure out how to find new posts. The Categories or Latest pages show active threads rather than individual posts. I just used the bell icon to change my setting on the forums to Watching or Tracking (I’m not clear on the difference and tried both). I think that’ll generate some notifications for individual posts.
It didn’t work for the “Recent New” tab for me, though. Unfortunately latest.rss just links threads and doesn’t include the replies. I didn’t find a way to produce an RSS feed of all replies (to any post).
I call this a hamburger menu (I think that’s mostly what it’s called in app development, which is where I know it from). Site menu sounds reasonable too.