The discussion revolves around confusion regarding Discourse’s ‘Unread’ tab and automatic topic tracking. Hanon_Ondricek explains that users may still receive notifications and see topics in ‘Unread’ after dismissing them, due to tracking settings based on interaction (e.g., replying). They clarify that ‘Unread’ includes topics with new posts that the user has previously opened and read for at least 4 minutes, even if not actively tracking. Lilly suggests checking personal tracking preferences and admin settings like default categories tracking. Hanon_Ondricek confirms they have no custom tracking settings, suspecting the issue stems from the ‘Dismiss Unread’ action setting tracking to ‘Normal’ instead of ‘Muted’. They conclude that muting a topic should prevent notifications and ‘Unread’ visibility, but it remains searchable. pfaffman agrees with this understanding, highlighting the distinction between tracking levels and notification behavior.
I didn’t find anything relevant by searching but this may be me misunderstanding how Tracking and notifications work.
A user notified that when they were on the “Unread” tab and clicked “Dismiss” and the box to automatically untrack all these topics, that they were still receiving notifications for those topics.
I explained how Discourse sets tracking levels if users reply to posts, and that “Unread” is topics users are tracking even if they weren’t aware the forum was tracking posts they interacted with, and that if they were replying and tracking and then used the Dismiss menu to set the topics to normal (not mute) that they still might get pinged if someone @'s or quotes something they wrote or replies.
I then dismissed everything from my unread menu and checked the box. Within a few minutes, the Unread tab now had a few topics for me to look at. One being a long running topic I haven’t replied to nor read for weeks. Nobody active in that thread was replying to me, mentioning me, or quoting anything I said, so I’m not sure why it’s showing in “Unread”.
I was under the assumption that “Unread” meant “unread replies in topics you were tracking and interacting with” but am I confused, or am I overcomplicating it and Unread will include any new post, even in a topic that isn’t tracked (and is not muted)?
I’ve got nothing set in default categories tracking so I would venture it’s set to Normal and not Mute by default. This is likely both me and the user conflating “new” messages under Unread with tracking. I’m starting to suspect my user dismissed posts, and then a new reply was added to something they tracked before (making it appear under Unread) but this is not a notification in the dropdown. I was also confused, so I’ll investigate further. Thank you!
My current hypothesis is since the “stop tracking these topics” tick box from Dismiss Unread sets tracking to “Normal” instead of muted, my user is getting notifications from their own replies and under Unread since the topic is not fully muted.
Muting a topic or category should prevent it from notifying or showing up under Unread as far as I understand! But it can still be searched for or navigated to from Categories or the Latest tab, though it won’t be dotted as having new replies.