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

Right now I have this topic where i’m shown 155 unread replies, but in the replies column i can only see 3.

Not sure how this should be changed in discourse, but those 2 numbers are very different and 155 is misleading since all the replies were deleted. Would it make sense to not show the “number of deleted replies” when counting the “number of unread replies” ?

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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.

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I’m talking out of my ass here, but would it make sense to not count any deletion?

Basically ignore anything that’s deleted, and
count normally all the new replies.

Saying this since really, there’s nothing new for me to read there, and that’s why in on a forum (to read/reply = discuss).

Or maybe that add artificial deleted count could be set to 1 (hard cap), so that I’m notified there’s something changed?

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Thing is on the topic list we do not count anything. We know the user read up to post number 5 and that post number 20 is the last post

We have to avoid counting, counting is expensive it means we have to visit every post

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Just fell for this again

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Was in the middle of composing a new ux report about this, because of how often it confuses me:

Just thought about this more, would whispers cause the same effect?

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Some topics have a lot of deleted replies

image

lots of posts are auto deleted via general forum maintenance here (ie: “all replies to this topic will be deleted after x time”) , since Meta has been around since the beginning of Discourse.

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And that makes perfect sense, it’s just confusing to see that a topic supposedly has over 600 unread replies, only to check the topic and see one.

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Indeed they do:


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