Hi, I act as a moderator on a hosted Discourse solution (https://community.gamedev.tv) and over the last few days have noticed an issue with posts not being set as read. I am not an admin, so am not able to access any settings, equally I am not sure when updates take place, I guess these are done server-wide, but wondered if there had been a recent update which may have caused this behaviour? Regarding the posts, I can scroll to the bottom of a topic, the styling of the last post is highlighted and fades out. If I return to the main summary/home page of the forum the count has not changed. Additionally, some posts are being marked with a grey icon for the count instead of the blue. The only way I have found to force this to change is to scroll to the bottom of the topic, and change the tracking options to “Normal”, but this is a very manual process and wasn’t necessary previously. Any thoughts/suggestions would be welcome. Kind regards - Rob

I strongly suspect some CSS or HTML (or JavaScript, if you have any) customization is interfering with read state. I’m going to disable your customizations temporarily as I am quite confident this is the issue. Admin, Customize, HTML/CSS, Links, “enabled” checkbox set to off.

The first thought I had was “whispers strikes again” IF it is only the rare topic ELSE if all topics then it is something else going on.

[image] codinghorror: Are there issues with plugins or customizations there that could be interfering? Hi Jeff, thanks for the reply. Honestly, I don’t think I would know as I don’t have the level of access to check. I think you are a member on the forum actually, but appreciate you don’t have time to make person house calls as it were for these things. There were some minor changes made I believe to the header/logo recently, which I think have been reverted, but I think that was primarily a CSS thing, sorry, I don’t really know. If this issue has occurred/been reported on the other hosted sites though it does suggest something specific about this one. I can ask the questions back to the admins but obviously, being piggy-in-the-middle, may lead to me not really asking the right questions (in either direction). So far only a small number of people have noticed it, but as a moderator it’s a bit of a p.i.t.a for me (selfish I know!)…

Is it specific to certain topics? Are whispers being used, as @Mittineague pointed out?

[image] Mittineague: IF it is only the rare topic ELSE if all topics then it is something else going on. Hi @Mittineague, from my view, it appears to be anything I respond to. Originally I had about 4 unread topics, this count has been growing steadily.

If you are a moderator you’d be able to see whispers. Only normal (non-staff) users can’t see whispers. Whispers is a staff function.

[image] codinghorror: Is it specific to certain topics? Are whispers being used, as @Mittineague pointed out? Doesn’t appear to be specific to any individual topics, I can recreate it I believe on any. I can test that in a moment, hmm, actually I don’t know if I can, as I guess I would need someone else to respond wouldn’t I (rather than me replying to my own topic to trigger an unread message). I don’t know what whispers are, but if it’s anything outside of the standard replying to a post I don’t believe so, no.

[image] codinghorror: If you are a moderator you’d be able to see whispers. Only normal (non-staff) users can’t see whispers. Whispers is a staff function. Can you tell me what identifies a post as a whisper? e.g. does it state “whisper” or is it a different colour or anything like that?

You can try it yourself as a staff member. In the reply area, click the gear icon, then toggle whisper. Try it in the staff category first :wink:

[image] codinghorror: You can try it yourself as a staff member. In the reply area, click the gear icon, then toggle whisper. Try it in the staff category first :wink: Ok, will do - I will go take a look at that now. Here’s a small screenshot by the way of what I see… [image] ..the blue/grey counts etc, and these are posts from all over the forum so I don’t think this is likely to be whispers - too many by too many different people for that to be the case.

Posts not being flagged as read due to CSS changes

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codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) September 22, 2016, 10:05pm 2

Are there issues with plugins or customizations there that could be interfering? I am not aware of any issues with read state on any other Discourse sites we host, across hundreds..

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Posts not being flagged as read due to CSS changes

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