It’s happening again, this time to the thread for Critical Race Theory, which by coincidence (or is it?) actually has 55 real posts, just like the Money-Laundering Thread had when the blue dots started. It’s currently showing a blue dot with 300. I’ll take a screen shot of it, but again, I don’t know how to post them.
Went back and it’s showing 440. Can I e-mail a screen shot to a mod? would that help @codinghorror ?
Hmm. I’m not seeing these number dots when I surf the SDMB with my iPhone, only when I do it on my Chromebook.
Now I’m starting to get blue dots with the current number of posts on threads that I’ve never posted to. Again, on my Chromebook, not my iPhone.
It doesn’t impair functionality, I can still read those threads if I wish; just that Discourse is telling me that i’ve posted to those threads when I haven’t, which undercuts the value of the blue dots.
Good news! We are consolidating the grey (old unread) and blue (new unread) circles in the very near future. A case of TMI.
Note that seeing an unread count (white number in blue circle) doesn’t mean you have posted to the topic. It means you are tracking the topic; click or tap the bell icon to change your notification state.
That still doesn’t explain how a thread can have several times more unread posts than it has posts, total.
No, I’m saying i get blue circles for threads I’m not tracking, and showing hundreds of new posts even though there may only be a couple of dozen posts to that thread.
That can happen when a lot of the topic posts have been deleted or merged with another topic. Anyway, click the bell, like I said, to change it.
I will try that next time, but that’s not what I"m saying was happening.
There would be a thread on the main page, that I had never read, in the column on the right, with 50 posts. And a blue dot by the thread name, saying there were 110 unread new posts.
I would go off and read a different thread, and when I came back to the main page, the same thread would still show 50 posts total. And a blue dot showing 220 unread new posts.
I would go read a different thread, come back to the main page, and that thread would still show 50 posts total, with a blue dot showing 330 unread new posts.
That wasn’t happening because of a merger of threads.
The number that the blue dot increased by was always the same for that thread the increment could be different for different threads.
I took a couple of screen shots, if that would be of any help.
It only happened on my Chromebook, not my iPhone.
That’s not impossible: it could be deleted (or even auto-deleted) spam posts that are causing it the bubbles.
However, it seems to be completely ignoring settings. I get them even though I’ve followed exactly 1 “topic” since I got here. Sometimes it’s in a thread I’ve posted in, sometimes not.
It seems that somewhere along the line, the setting for whether or not you followed a thread is getting ignored occasionally. It seems like it would be a race condition situation.
For me, refreshing the page usually fixes it. But it is weird…
Note that if you read a topic for more than 4 minutes, it will be set to tracking state, under the presumption that probably care about this topic if you spent at least 4 minutes reading it. You can configure this behavior in your user preferences.
And yes, a ghost spammer post that was posted, then deleted, could perhaps cause this. You’ll need to check with staff if you want to be sure.
No. I have this disabled. That’s my point. It seems like my setting in this regard is being ignored occasionally.
Also, sometimes it’s a topic I’ve never even opened.
Is it an old topic, that predates the migration? Then it is imported state from vBulletin.
I notice various occasional miscellaneous minor quirks from time to time – most often fixed by closing and re-opening the thread in question, or closing and then re-opening the Discourse app in my browser.
No. The topics are sometimes newer topics I’ve posted in. And sometimes they’re topics I’ve never seen before.
Also, I don’t believe vBulletin had a follow feature. You had a Watch feature which would send you an email if a thread (topic) got a new post. You could choose to make it tell you as they posted, or have it be a daily digest.
I don’t think it’s a setting that is messed up because refreshing the topic list (using my browser’s refresh button) will always get rid of the dots. It will persist through forum navigation (e.g. opening a thread, then clicking banner to go back to the front page), but a refresh always fixes it.
If it happens in the future, I will be sure to actually screenshot the actual topic, if that may help.
Oh, I see. Did you try pressing the “refresh” button in the browser? That might clear it up. But if it keeps happening let me know.
As I said I would, here’s an example. This was in a thread I had never opened before, and was 3 hours old. Discourse even took me to the third post in the thread when I clicked the link.
My new theory is that maybe the database has temporarily misidentified the user when returning results.
Interesting. So you had definitely never been to that topic before? I can’t think of any reason Discourse would think you have a read position in a topic you never opened before.
For old, migrated topics perhaps. That might be the first time I’ve ever heard anyone report a phantom read position in a new topic they’ve never read…
Could be a new bug, of course, but that’s very strange.
Nope. It was only three hours old at the time I noticed that. That said, I do remember someone else having a similar topic that I did read back when we were on vBulletin. Maybe that’s relevant?
When we started getting weird hiccups like this on vBulletin, we learned that the instance was overloaded—i.e. the software was having trouble keeping up and dropped some less important tasks. Is it possible that there are brief peaking in load which could cause something like this?
I’m now seeing a grey dot on “The Communist History of World War 2”, with 65 unread posts. According to the info to the right of the page, there are a total of 13 posts in that thread.
I do remember opening that thread and reading it, without posting, so that might explain getting dots. Doesn’t explain why the dot says that there are over fifty more posts than actually exist for that thread. Weird.