Discourse Confused About the Number of Posts in a Topic?

[Don]

Hello, yeah this is a known issue. Here is the related topic.

Number of unread replies is different than number of topic replies due to reply deletions

We have had this reported a few times before, it is fiendishly hard to fix. If a large number of posts are deleted then unread count is artificially incredibly high. We could I guess do a client fix that caps numbers but it just replaces imperfect with more imperfect. Problem with counting deleted replies is that there is no cheap way of do it. You may have read 17 of the 32 deleted replies.