track the page I am reading in the thread by page number
The page number is arbitrary though, depending on the number of posts per page you set. The default of 40 is pretty silly for being able to quickly jump to a specific post - 25 or 50 would have been better.
On Discord, the scroll widget shows you the post number and total posts. It is beyond trivial to just push it up (or down) to the exact post number and there you are. I have to say that dissing Discord for not making you find posts via unworkable page numbers is pretty perverse - that bit works very well.
And now you've got me playing with it, the quoting is good too. No longer a problem to just hit quote and include the entire unedited quote trail (which can sometime take up half a precious page) - just the first line is actually shown, but you can pop that open to the full thing with a click.
And... on quotes, there's a link to any reply which actually get show right there, instead of 20 pages later in an isolated necro-post. Gosh, it's almost like actual threading!
I am not keen on it, if only because of the fading in and out of the colour for no apparent reason, but it is not an unmitigated disaster if approach without the NIH or "it's change, therefore it's bad" minset. There are workable solutions to things that have been issues on previous forums, and some of them are even not bad solutions.