Tracked threads not showing up as unread

I’ve just noticed that several threads I have set to Tracked are not showing up as unread when there are new posts, and are always greyed out in the Latest overview, even when several new posts have been made after I’ve last checked these threads.

I’ve tried searching for the issue and one suggestion was checking that the categories or topics weren’t accidentally muted, but I checked this and they’re not. From what I could find this is not a known issue for Discourse (but my Google-fu might be failing me).

Is this a problem anyone else has encountered? And does anyone know what I could do to fix it? I’ve already tried playing around with the tracking settings for some of the threads this is happening in but to no avail.

EDIT: Also useful to note, maybe: it’s consistently the same topics that are always marked as read, it doesn’t vary. Certain topics just never show up as unread for me.

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I noticed that too. I figured it might be a matter of timing? I.e. Discourse would periodically run cron jobs or something to add the threads with new posts to the list of notifications, and the threads in question have just not been processed yet…? :thinking:

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I don’t think it’s a timing thing - it doesn’t matter how long I haven’t checked a thread, I’m missing threads in the unread overview I haven’t looked at for weeks (mostly because they haven’t appeared in my unread overview and as such I forgot about them).

I do also notice the unread counter is off quite often - like earlier today it showed I had 3 unread threads but only one would show. I thought this might be because I have one user set to ignored and the counter might still show their responses, but I checked the latest overview and there was a recent post in one of the threads that should have been in my unread overview, and not by the user I have set to ignored, so that’s making me think that’s not it and there’s something weird going on.

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Ok that does indeed sound much weirder than what I thought I had seen… :thinking:

Do you think it could be worth getting in touch with the Discourse team?

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Could be, but I figured I’d check if others have had this problem first, and if anyone has figured anything out or might know something I might have messed up myself.

Also I’d have to look into how to get in touch with the Discourse team :joy:

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I think maybe @seanblue knows more in that regard?

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This is probably unrelated, but on the offchance that it’s not, for some reason, today I have problems with scripts on Discourse (and only on discourse). I need to reload, sometimes to close the tab and reopen it again, before they load…

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Have you tried refreshing the page? I find I need to refresh on occasion.

Possibly related, recently I’ve noticed when I open a tracked thread to view the latest posts, it’ll load at the bottom, and then abruptly jump up by a few dozen posts. It’s kinda irritating.

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I’ve noticed this happening for a while as well. Just yesterday, I got a like in the froggo appreciation thread, and that’s how I discovered there were new posts from days ago despite it never showing up in my unread! Undoubtedly there are others, especially if this as been going on as long as the count at the bottom of the page telling me I have more unread than show up on the unread page, but ofc I don’t know them

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Yeah, hard refresh and everything. I don’t think the issue is client-side (but I haven’t checked the responses from the server, maybe I should? Could be useful debugging information)

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I’ve noticed the same thing lately too. And I find it kinda irritating too :sweat_smile:

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To whoever wants to report this, make an account on https://meta.discourse.org and post in either support or bugs. Only post in bugs if you have clear steps to reproduce the issue. If you don’t have steps to reproduce, you can still explain the situation and ask for help in support. Let them know it’s happening on these forums specifically. Discourse does run background jobs for some things and they have stopped working in the past, so it’s possible the issue is limited to just these forums due to one of those jobs stopping rather than it being an actual bug. Who knows.

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Wait, now I’m getting what you’re talking about. And yes, I have this issue too! I just failed to notice. ^^;

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I think there’s a lot of “stuck-in-limbo” with the thread-page simply not loading, not to mention upload of images where the preview refuse to show said image or even, after posting, the image still doesn’t show properly unless you reload the whole page. :eyes: Something is defo off with Discourse since a couple of weeks back at least for me.

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Oh, I forgot about that one. Yeah, I’ve noticed images are very slow to load lately, if they load at all.

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Hey yamitenshi,

Have you had any success with Discourse support? If anyone else has, please feel free to chime in as well!

-Nick at WK

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That is an excellent question, and the answer is… I ended up postponing this until “later” and “later” turned out to mean “completely forget about this until someone reminds you”. Which you have just done, so… I have just posted in the Discourse Meta forums and will keep you posted if something comes back :sweat_smile:

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No worries! Thank you for doing that. We will keep an eye out for an update! :sunglasses: Let us know if we need to reach out to support directly!

-Nick at WK

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Small update: I have not yet recieved any response (shouldn’t be too surprising after 40 whole minutes) but I’ve done some poking around and I do think it’s a bug of sorts. I also posted this on the Discourse Meta thread, but I’ll post it here too for whoever’s interested:


I think I see a technical reason for this. In the JSON that comes back from /latest.json, for one of the affected topics I see

highest_post_number: 6561

but then I also see

last_read_post_number: 8819

for the same topic - so it appears for some reason Discourse is convinced I’ve last read a post that has not yet been made. This topic also happens to be an automatic continuation of a previous topic that exceeded the 10k post limit. I’m not sure if both these things are the case for all affected topics, but I’ll keep an eye on this.

The same holds for another affected topic, with highest_post_number: 403 and last_read_post_number: 2334. This one is also a continuation of a previous topic.

A third one too - highest_post_number: 1402 and last_read_post_number: 6212. This one is not a continuation of a previous topic though.

Still no idea what caused it or how to reproduce the issue though :smile:

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