I don't really know how to respond to this one because I still think you are confusing things. Although I can tell you that yes – users (and Guests when we can do it) DO get a red bullet in the dropdown.
Can we just forget the dropdown for a while and concentrate on the admin bar? I agree that this is not of use to all of our users and it really does depend on what sort of forum you are operating. The type that is a 'community' discussion type board may well not care – especially if they do not use moderation. And that is the reason a user can completely turn off the admin queue and not use it.
However, for a forum like ours here – or like Olivers at Delicious Days (cForms support) – it IS important to keep track of which posts have and have not been answered. Every post has to be specifically responded to by one of us – that is the responsibility we have taken on – so it is important. This is also the reason we have expended so much time and effort on making the admin bar useful and why, for V4, I have recoded it all to allow for multiple topic posts to be shown, mass approvals and even a reply edit box. I do not see what on earth the difference is between a new post that needs approval or a new post that does not. They both need the attention of one of us and they both need to be answered.
Going back over old ground again I may be but it is important. The move in V4 to multiple admins while itself a good and positive move, has dynamically changed the way the admins queue works. As a single admin up until this point, I always ensured that a post was only removed from the queue when I was ready to respond to it. Failure to do that ran the risk of forgetting to do so or, on a busy day, the post disappearing off of the radar altogether. I believe we have never had a post that went ignored.
Now, however, we have two admins and you have a different methodology. In opening new posts from any other source they get removed from the queue (because you are an admin viewing that post) but you do not necessarily respond to them. They no longer exist in the queue and run the risks descibed above. In fact in the short time that V4 has been live there have been at least two posts that waited 2 days for an answer because I completely lost track of them. (I ended up working through all the admin email notifications and checking each and every one).
This is NOT a criticism of the way you work – it is, to my mind a flaw that has been inroduced by the new circumstances and a flaw that needs attention and plugging. My suggestion – in post 3 above – was an attempt to propose a way that this could be achieved. (In fact, you seemed to come very nearly to the same proposal in post 2 when you said “does the dropdown have to be linked to the admin bar unread posts? seems like they could be and should be separate entities. seems like your color coding scheme (which sounds pretty good) would be better suited for the admin bar than the dropdown.”)
NOW let's get back to the dropdown. It is a list of the most recent posts (the number of which is set by the user) that shows, by highlighting them with a colour, those that have been added to the forum since your last visit/login. If you happen to be an admin or moderator, it also shows those awaiting approval. If you are a member or a guest it doesn't.
What it is NOT, to my mind, is a fullproof method of ensuring that every post gets an answer. And if you read the method by which new posts are dealt with (in the online help and also agreed by us a long time back) it is plain that this is the case.
