Notifications being regenerated by looking through actions

Support
1

Ok, this is a weird story on an older version but I was hoping that someone would have some pointers or maybe a similar experience.

We have a forum (on 2.4.5 because of a bespoke plugin dependency) where people complain about duplicate notifications. Sometimes notifications are regenerated days after an event happened and after a user has seen (and clicked on) those notifications multiple times - in the Discourse UI (not in the app, not in the browser).

posts for a topic:

 post_number |         created_at         
-------------+----------------------------
           1 | 2020-06-22 17:06:42.531868
           2 | 2020-06-23 00:11:07.159579
           3 | 2020-06-24 00:35:06.000641
           4 | 2020-06-25 00:17:16.998622
           5 | 2020-06-29 00:00:39.712988
           6 | 2020-06-29 01:03:20.137653
           7 | 2020-06-29 01:32:45.604947

notifications for this user for this topic:

   id    | notification_type | user_id |         created_at         | topic_id | post_number 
---------+-------------------+---------+----------------------------+----------+-------------
 1125345 |                 5 |     956 | 2020-06-24 21:45:21.521173 |    39247 |           3
 1133280 |                 5 |     956 | 2020-06-29 01:27:32.242212 |    39247 |           6
 1140349 |                 2 |     956 | 2020-07-02 21:11:44.843782 |    39247 |           7

As you can see, a reply notification was generated for post #7 over 3.5 days after the reply was made.

When grepping through the access logs to find out what happened at 21:11:44 we saw that this user was browsing through their Profile - Activity - Replies (/user_actions.json?username=redacted&filter=5&offset=240) at that exact second.

It almost seems like browsing through those replies regenerated the notification.

Relevant plugins are onesignal and push-notifications.

Does anyone have ANY idea?

EDIT a day later the notification for post #7 has been regenerated:

   id    | notification_type | user_id |         created_at         | topic_id | post_number 
---------+-------------------+---------+----------------------------+----------+-------------
 1125345 |                 5 |     956 | 2020-06-24 21:45:21.521173 |    39247 |           3
 1133280 |                 5 |     956 | 2020-06-29 01:27:32.242212 |    39247 |           6
 1141684 |                 2 |     956 | 2020-07-04 02:23:12.188685 |    39247 |           7
1 Like
2

This sounds vaguely familiar to me as a bug we fixed at some point? Hard to say.

2 Likes
3

Hmm, relevant plugins are onesignal and push-notifications and follow.

@outofthebox I think this is related

The user that created the post (user #15356) that generates the notification to the user repeatedly receiving the notification (user #956) is:

  • following the user receiving the notification
  • followed by a user that does not exist (user #16229)

:

 select user_id, name, value from user_custom_fields where user_id=15356;
 user_id |     name     |         value          
---------+--------------+------------------------
   15356 | followers    | 16229 --> this user does not exist
   15356 | following    | 56,0
   15356 | following    | 956,0 --> the user receiving the notification
2 Likes
4

So this is another instance of the follow plugin bug?

5

I’m not sure (yet), it seems a little different, but OTOH there is much in common.

1 Like