Users are discussing a UX issue in Discourse where the number of unread replies shown in the topic list differs significantly from the actual number of visible replies, due to deleted posts. TheBestPessimist highlights that 155 unread replies are shown, but only 3 are visible, questioning whether deleted replies should be excluded from the unread count. sam explains that counting unread posts is computationally expensive and currently avoids counting deleted ones, but this leads to misleading high unread numbers. TheBestPessimist suggests ignoring deleted replies entirely or capping the count. tomtjes and Firepup650 confirm the issue is common and confusing, especially when topics have many deleted replies due to automated cleanup. Firepup650 notes that the discrepancy is particularly jarring when a topic shows over 600 unread replies but only one visible reply. Lilly adds that this is common in long-running forums like Meta, where posts are auto-deleted after a period. Firepup650 also confirms that whispers trigger the same issue.
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” ?
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.
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?
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
Just fell for this again
Was in the middle of composing a new Contribute > UX report about this, because of how often it confuses me:
Just thought about this more, would whispers cause the same effect?
Some topics have a lot of deleted replies
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.
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.
