Browser tab notification count numbers are off / out of sync

Hi,

As far as I can tell, the numbers that show up in the page title are entirely random. For me, our local community forum has been stuck on ‘12’ for at least a day and a half now:

And when I say “stuck on” what I mean is that I see there are 12 new things to look at (there aren’t) so I go to the tab, and read or dismiss the two, or four, or… seven things that have changed since the last time I was here, and then go back to other things. When I look up… 30? 45min later, the number is at 12 again. But it’s not always 12. Being stuck on a number is a new thing. Usually it’s some random small integer that is almost always higher than the number of New threads, Unread posts, or Notifications - very often combined.

This has been going on for quite a while, but it took me a while to first register the behavior and then do a good capture.

 
Ann

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Sounds like a problem with sidekiq. Have a look at https://community.sonarsource.com/sidekiq

1 Like

Thanks @pfaffman!

That’s 404 for me. I’m Staff but not Admin. Does the page need admin privs to access?

Yes. You’ll need to check with an admin or whoever runs your server. At some point you’ll see a message at /admin that sidekiq is backed up.

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Thanks again @pfaffman! I’ve passed this on to the admins.

 
:smiley:
Ann

There is some reason here for what you have described.

Once a tab is in the background we “slow down” all requests to Discourse. In some conditions we can even completely stop message bus reqs.

You control which number we try to sync up here, in your user prefs:

image

Is this a laptop that opens and closes? Does this start misbahaving after N hours? Note background tabs only update once every 2 minutes.

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Hi,

@pfaffman I’m told that sidekiq is only for self-hosted sites, which ours is not. Thanks very much for your help anyway!

@sam it is a laptop, but it sits open on my desk 99% of the time and certainly the entire time during weekdays. That doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally take long bathroom breaks and have to log back in, but those occur far less frequently than I see this bug.

I haven’t noted at what point in the day it starts misbehaving. Generally I’m pretty active in the community in the morning, and then move on to other things and peripherally start to notice that a number has been added to the tab title. I’d say it’s every 30-45 min - sometimes as long as an hour, sometimes much sooner - that I notice a new number.

Where in my user prefs will I find that dropdown? Here’s what I’m seeing under Notifications:

 
Thx,
Ann

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What you described would seem to indicate that the number in the browser tab could be lower than the actual number. I have mine set to New Notifications, and I regularly see the number in the tab be higher than the actual number of notifications I have once I focus the tab.

I am using a laptop, but it’s set to never go to sleep, so I don’t think that would be related.

I’ve actually noticed this behavior on Meta. I clear notification activity and the page title doesn’t show a number, then some time later when there’s a notification, the number shows up again, but it’s the number previously shown when I first loaded the site. FWIW, I’m running latest Firefox on Mac.

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And I’m on Chrome, Linux

Just to be clear - Sidekiq is used by all Discourse sites, self-hosted or not. It’s just you don’t have access to the Sidekiq dashboard on a hosted site.

3 Likes

Oh my, this has been broken since the end of June.

I just fixed it per:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/3e855e33ae11250f79e2c621d819c08d0309e33d

I will get your site deployed shortly!

Thank you so much for raising this!

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Thanks @sam!

BTW, I really hate the min char requirements. :slight_smile:

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Just press the like button, that is exactly what it is there for.

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This topic was automatically closed after 40 hours. New replies are no longer allowed.

I appreciate your persistence here, please keep up the bug reporting!

Note regarding char requirement you can control it in site settings on your community, we much prefer to stay with defaults here as it avoids huge amounts of noise on topics.

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