It's in a bad spot with SMF. It's on the forum index down with the stats section.
Right above [More Stats] You'll see a link: "View the most recent posts on the forum."
Direct link:
https://forums.cutcodedown.com/index.php?action=recentI might try and squeeze that into the avatar area top-right. Though the "show unread posts since your last visit" is a kissing cousin.
It's funny though, you like discourse, I think their UI is useless shit. Half the time I can't even find the timestamps for when things were posted, or navigate posts due to the complete lack of organization.
Like this useless crap:
https://meta.discourse.org/Where they tell you when there was last activity, but not when the thread itself was created. Herpa-freaking-derp. You think over-bumps of dead threads is bad on normal forums? Discourse makes it a total ****-show.
Though a lot of that seems to be that discourse out of the box -- and most of the skins people write for it -- have undersized fixed metric fonts and garbage layouts that break when you try to zoom. /fail/fail/ at web development. I do not understand the appeal.