I stumbled upon this discussion because I was in a Canvas course as a student, and the course used discussions. Here is what I discovered in the Canvas course.
When I enter a discussion web page, all unread posts show with blue dots but then quickly change to white, meaning the posts have been read. This is how the Canvas course that I was in was acting. It has nothing to do with me, the student, actually reading anything. All that it says is "The student opened the discussion web page and Canvas thinks the student read all posts."
I think that this is a fundamentally incorrect design. Only the student knows what they have "read" or "not read." Any new posts should be "white" to indicate that they are unread, and then the student can check off those specific posts that they have read, making them blue. Blue should mean "I read this," and white should mean "This post is new and unread." The absence of color should mean the absence of reading. Canvas has this incorrectly reversed, where the absence of color means student activity.
Apparently, a system-level setting might affect this logic, but I am not an administrator, so I don't know.
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