I use the back arrow, going from the alerts list to the topics list.
I'm not sure I have posed the question clearly enough. I belong to the British large scale forum, "G Scale Central". When I log on, there is a symbol on the upper right of the page indicating that someone has either quoted one of my posts or has "Liked" it. On this forum I see now way of knowing when someone has done either of those two actions unless I go through each topic that I remember posting something on.