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.

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..

[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

Product Support

Mittineague (Mittineague) September 22, 2016, 10:15pm 3

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.

Topic		Replies	Views
Bottom of topic shows "There is 1 unread remaining" when there are actually 0 unread topics remaining Bug	29	3147	November 5, 2025
Unread count shows Unread (14) but /unread is empty Bug	14	857	June 3, 2026
New posts, read posts, unread posts - I like this Site feedback	4	3290	June 23, 2013
Long term whisper posts on topics? Bug	9	3588	December 5, 2016
"Unread post" notifications for my own posts Bug	3	743	April 14, 2022

Posts not being flagged as read due to CSS changes

Related topics