I have the same situation described as here, except that I have administration account, and the newest version of Discourse, so I should definitely see flagged PM. The flag notification is there, but there is no active flag listed.
I tried to rebuild Discoure’s container but it didn’t help. Is there any way to easily trace back where the “count” of flags is created?
Did you have Post Moderation Queue enabled at one point? Try re-enabling it and seeing if any posts are in the queue.
Okay, so I’m not 100% sure either… as I’ve only heard it being suggested as a possible issue from others, but maybe it deals with these two settings?
Do you have the Akismet Plugin installed?
Thank you @cpradio I’ve fixed it thanks to your advice.
I’ve changed “approve post count” to some number. After that “Needs Approval” showed in “hamburger” menu where I found one post pending. I think that this behaviour should be considered as a bug and solution would be to add an additional check for showing this “Needs Approval” item in the menu, something like this in pseudocode:
if settings.approve_post_count == 0 and pending_posts == 0:
menu.needs_approval.hide()This has come up enough times that I don’t disagree with you. 
I agree this has come up enough times that we have to do something about it:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/e52ed6606977fb10d88e9581260fe3f4727de972
If any posts need approval the link will show up, even if the feature is disabled.
Complaints Driven Development 