Can't clear a grey unread counter on a meta topic due to Whispers

AI-generated summary

A user, downey, reported a grey unread counter on a 6-month-old meta topic that wouldn’t clear despite reading all posts. cpradio attributed the issue to Whispers, which can cause unread counters to remain even after reading all public posts.

The discussion led to a call to address the issue, with eviltrout and zogstrip agreeing that a proper fix is necessary, rather than relying on hacks. cpradio suggested marking Whispers as read for non-staff users who visit the topic, but expressed concerns about potential negative side effects. codinghorror pointed out that Whispers work well for email-created topics, as the recipients don’t see the topic in their web browser.

Continuing the discussion from Moderate emails which would normally bounce?:

Today I got an unread counter on this 6+ month old topic. Despite reading all the posts, the grey (1) counter won’t clear. Bug?

No, it is Whispers :slight_smile: (really should see what can be done about that, as this comes up regularly)

3개의 좋아요

Now I’m feeling suspicious wondering who’s talking behind our backs :wink:

But yeah, it can only lead to confusion…

It was @erlend_sh asking me to clarify some stuff :wink: I guess these questions could have been public.

(I’m starting to dislike whispers due to that specific issue…)

1개의 좋아요

As the Apache Software Foundations projects tend to say about their open source work, “if it doesn’t happen [on the list] it doesn’t happen”. :wink:

1개의 좋아요

I’ve been wondering if the simple solution is to mark them as Read if the user is not staff and they visit the topic. But I’m not sure if that won’t have any negative side effects (and the user has read to the end of the topic).

1개의 좋아요

I think we should circle back and fix this properly. I discovered the issue far too late into whisper development and we opted to mark the feature as experimental rather than fix.

The problem is the fix isn’t simple, but I think it’s worthwhile to figure it out.

6개의 좋아요

I also agree with @eviltrout. None of the hacks we’ve come up really helps. The only fix is to roll up our sleeves and do the work.

1개의 좋아요

Whispers work great on email created topics since the people on the other end do not see the topic in the web browser anyway… I think this use case makes a lot more sense anyway.