WAD (and it's XenForo, not Take Command, so it doesn't really belong in this forum).
IMO it would be an incredibly bad idea to blindly mark messages you haven't even seen as "read".
I disagree on both counts.
This forum is a key part of JPsoft support, and JPsoft pays its vendor for its use. If the forum would cause harm (even though I don't see how that could happen), century-old legal tradition would make JPsoft liable. Besides, as a paying customer, you have clout to force your vendor to make changes. As a third party to the transaction, your users have no legal standing to ask your vendor to do anything.
First, there is sufficient safeguard in the two-step (and sometimes 3-step) procedure to safeguard against accidental mismarking. The additional, slow steps required in the situation discussed are further irritant against using a GUI-based system for text access. But most significant is that messages marked "already read" are not deleted from the forum, the user who does not want to even hear about them today can go back next year and actually read (more likely, reread) them. We regularly reread messages in earlier parts of a thread before answering a later one (or at least we ought to do that to stay on topic without duplication).