Hi, all! I ran into this bug a few minutes ago. A moderator replied to the topic with a whisper but their avatar is shown on the homepage. I have seen this issue multiple times and am guessing this is not by design.
Below, is the respective topic and a screenshot of the topic preview. Let me know if I can clarify anything, thanks!
Yup, I can confirm the repro. We’ll take a look.
@codinghorror what is your preferred fix here?
Given our data model the only simple fix is to omit whisper users from the user list unconditionally.
That means if you whisper it will not look like you are the last poster (even to other admins)
A more comprehensive fix here imo is going to be very complicated.
A simple fix sounds fine to me!
hey @lucaviness
Do you still experience that issue? I checked the example topic mentioned by you and avatar is already gone. I tried to replicate it on my instance as well and I couldn’t find a bug.
I think that it is fixed already. I will close this topic, but please let us know if you experience that bug once again.
In the past, I’ve seen the avatar and then after a few days it disappeared. Not sure if that is what you’re seeing or it’s fixed. I’ll keep you updated.
Thanks, @HAWK. I saw this issue resurface today when a moderator transferred their post from public to a whisper. From the home page of the forum, it showed that he had replied and I had not opened it, but there was no reply to view.
Hi @lucaviness. 
I have not been able to reproduce this bug.
I couldn’t figure out how to turn a post into a whisper, and then read:
Could it be that the person published a regular post, and then deleted it and recreated the message as a whisper?
That might explain the user icon appearing, since their normal post would show up, but if they delete that message it wouldn’t immediately remove their avatar from the topics list until there was a refresh. I was able to reproduce that effect. 
If you are staff on the site in question, you might be able to see a log of what happened, here’s what mine looks like:
Hope that helps, and that whispers are working as expected. 
