Admin getting spammed with reply notifications, years later

Support
1

Through some sort of bug with our forum’s migration from Vbulletin awhile back, I ended up watching a ton of threads posted by other admins. And by tons, I mean 758.

Normally this wouldn’t be an issue but for some reason recently I’m getting CONSTANT notifications from years-old threads. As far as I can tell nobody is making new posts to those ancient threads, and yet they pop up in my notifications anyway. There’s no real commonality to these threads other than that they were created by other forum admins, who assumedly wanted to watch them, before September 2016.

I don’t have any categories watched, and indeed tried watching, muting, and then setting every category to normal. Didn’t help, every couple of minutes I get a new notification about a thread nobody’s looked at since 2013.

We’re running v2.3.0.beta9 +7, if that matters.

Is there any way to unwatch all threads for my user? I’m willing to run DB commands if necessary.

Edit: Upgraded to v2.3.0.beta10 +58, didn’t fix it. It looks like I get a slew of new notifications every 14-16 minutes, so I went into Sidekiq and tried manually triggering jobs, but none of them created new notifications.

2

Weird. What’s the notification form, e.g. what would it be notifying you about?

Is this specific to your account or are others reporting it?

3

The notifications are for “new” replies to threads I’m watching, for some reason. But the replies are from years ago.

Nobody else is reporting it. I think it’s something to do with my being an admin, as you can see all the notifications are for threads posted by admins that were linked to our wordpress frontpage.

The Noriega thread: Manuel Noriega wants a piece of Call of Duty - Games - Quarter To Three Forums

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Edit: Looking at the threads, it thinks I am the poster-- but I’m not.

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4

Hmmm, the “you created” doesn’t fit my guess. If you go to
https://meta.discourse.org/my/preferences/notifications
is the “Consider topics new when” set to “I haven’t viewed them yet”?

5

No, that is set to “in the last 2 days”.

I just changed it to “I haven’t viewed them yet” to see if that helps.

I really think it’s just screwed up from the migration from vBulletin. Is there no way to unwatch every thread for my user?

6

I think you want not that!

That sounds suspect. If you go to “unread” you should be able to bulk dismiss. Depend on how many topics were imported it might take a while, but other than that you would need to do some kind of console command, if one is possible.

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7

Bulk dismiss works fine, until 15-30 minutes later when I get a dozen more in my notifications. There’s some batch process that keeps generating these notifications!

8

IIRC, when we first migrated from vBulletin I used to get them in batches of 200. Maybe there’s a job queue you could clear?

9

Maybe. But where? I checked sidekiq already.

Also we migrated from vB like 2-3 years ago.

10

My goodness, I would think that if the migration was the problem it would have settled down by now.

Sorry, I’m out of ideas.

11

Thanks. What I’m really looking for is instructions to enter the backend DB and unwatch all topics for my user.

12

Maybe Mute every category and then after a while Normal every category? It would depend on the precedence of topics - categories, mute - watch.

13

Tried that, although I didn’t try waiting an hour in between muting and setting back to normal. Will give it a shot, can’t hurt anything.

Edit: Nope, didn’t work. Just got 9 new notifications with every single category in the forum muted.

14

Still getting hundreds of notifications per day. Is there no way to unwatch every thread by running an update statement in the DB?

15

Who did your migration?

16

It was actually done by Discourse engineers.

It’s been years since, so there must be some recent change that started spamming notifications for these ancient threads.

17

Could you be in a group that has watching some category turned on?

18

My user is in admins, moderators, staff, and TL0 through TL4. No custom groups. I looked through them and don’t see anywhere to set category watching on. Where would I look to find that?

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19

This is really bizarre.

Any ideas on this @sam?

@wingtip are you running any third party plugins?

20

No third-party in Discourse, no. Plugins are discourse-affiliate, discourse-patreon, discourse-spoiler-alert, and docker_manager.

We do have Wordpress integration but that comes from the Wordpress side and I’m not clear on how it works. We’re running the WP-Discourse-Embed from Arpit and some sort of custom “discourse topic fixer” that I just noticed was updated June 4th and am going to follow up on immediately.

https://github.com/techAPJ/wp-discourse-embed

Edit: Yeah, that WP plugin was the problem, they are reformatting the way every Discourse-linked post looks and didn’t tell me about it beforehand. Sorry for wasting your time on this.

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