I have a habit of reading a CLO article only when a comment about it shows up on the Articles forum.
For those like myself, who tend to view CLO only through its forum back door, why not create an empty post in the Articles forum whenever there is a new CLO article. It could carry the same title as the article, such as “My Life as an Underpromoter”, and it could be attributed to the author rather than to SysAdmin. The content of the post could consist of the simple “Click on the link above to view the article.”
If it is not feasible to attribute the post to the author, then go ahead and attribute it to SysAdmin, but include the author’s name in the post title, as in “My Life as an UnderPromoter, by Jane Doe”.
Then, once somebody posts an actual comment on the article, perhaps this dummy post could be removed.
Bill Smythe
I might be mistaken, Bill, but I thought that every CLO article does get such a post to the forums in the “Chess Life Articles” forum. It gets a ‘dummy post’ in that forum when put online for feedback. Click the thread title, then click the Article name at the top of the page and you’re at the article.
At least, that’s the way I’ve been doing it. And I use “View New Posts” whenever I log into the forums.
Unless I missed something? No, wait… I did miss something… I see that actually browsing the forum returns no results with “0 replies”… But when they’re first posted I know I see them when doing a View New Posts search, even if it hasn’t been commented on yet. Hmm… Now I see what you mean. 
A conundrum, that the SysAdmin could fix by making a dummy comment on the article - or maybe one that could be scripted to do that automagically. 
ETA… Pages 35 to 47 inclusive of the CLA Forum’s index return no topics. I assume that’s probably before article comments were allowed? But still - the initial posts made by SysAdmin don’t seem to show as ‘posts’ when the articles are loaded in for comment. Yet they show on “View New Posts.” Still hmm…
If I go directly to the Articles forum, I see no such dummy posts. At this moment, for example, there are no posts for All Draws in the World Cup Final or for Nakamura in London, A Loss to McShane.
I’m well aware this works – for those articles that have been commented on.
I’d never tried that, but when I tried it just now, I saw a dummy entry for only one of the two articles I mentioned above.
Hmm, that might represent articles that have expired and whose comments have been removed. I don’t know.
Bill Smythe
^
The only problem with posting a dummy comment would be the articles system would lose the, “Be the first person to comment…” system - all articles would shift to “View comments (1 so far),” or whatever it says.
My working hypothesis would be that a forum entry is created for every article automatically, but we’re only ‘seeing’ the ones that have 1 or more replies. Or that the Forums are hacked into recognizing the CMS’ comments database as a subforum, but incompatibility bugs are causing the “I won’t show 0 replies” problem. Maybe something like the content management system plays with the Forum php database, but since the phpBB software isn’t making the changes the system doesn’t recognize the entry until commented on, or vice versa.
Anyway, enough technobabble. Mainly I forgot to say that I do the same thing as you - use the Forums (via View New Posts) as a backdoor into keeping up with Chess Life articles (online and print.) So a fix that would show all the articles would be much appreciated! (Wonder if this should be classed as a “USCF Issue”, as we don’t have a “Forum Issues” forum.)