This happens when you close or open topics; it can happen when you assign topics and in various other conditions.
Over the years, we have heard many complaints from people who simply do not want to be notified about this administrivia. This is particularly noticeable when admins bulk close topics or can come as a surprise when topics are auto-closed due to timers.
We are partway through rolling out a change that will exclude all small actions from your Watched and Tracked lists.
We will not be making this optional. We track two counters on the topics table so we know what the last post is on a topic; we do not want to inflate that to four counters.
Let us know what you think and if you feel like it will impact your forums.
I noticed that the “closed” small action posts on topics here on Meta now always appear as unread. The “last visit” line is always above, not only once and the next time I visit the topic there is no line because everything is read
Yeah, there is a major impact with a Forum I am a moderator of.
I outlined the issue here in its own post before I was referred here for feedback:
TLDR; Auto-bumping’s main use/purpose has been made mostly moot now as it is considered a small post action, and we rely on auto-bumps for our Support threads.
In addition to the issue of small action posts appearing as unread even though I have already read them, which is especially confusing in categories that take you to the first post when everything has been read, because while these unread action posts are ignored for that decision, they still trigger the read-progress indicator and the “jump to last read” option in the topic timeline, which contradicts the behavior of jumping to the first post because everything was supposedly read.
The lack of response to this is also not particularly encouraging. It makes me question whether it is worth spending the time to document the other negative impacts I have noticed. So feel free to ignore this as well, just like my last two posts, in case asking for feedback was merely rhetorical.
I also think the information shown in topic lists is quite confusing now:
This says that I am the author of the first post, which is correct. It says that Gerhard participated in the topic (he pinned it), and then it also says that I am the most recent poster. There is only one post written by me.
Other topics with only one post don’t get the additional blue indicator for the OP being both the first and most recent poster. This is an example of a topic with only one post. The OP’s avatar is shown, but there is no additional blue border indicating that they are also the most recent poster:
