# Reply counts on topics with auto-deleting posts

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/reply-counts-on-topics-with-auto-deleting-posts/156115
**Category:** Bug
**Created:** [June 27, 2020, 5:51pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/reply-counts-on-topics-with-auto-deleting-posts/156115 "2020-06-27T17:51:07Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 5

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### Author: ![sam](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/sam/32/102149_2.png) [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [June 30, 2020, 7:47am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/reply-counts-on-topics-with-auto-deleting-posts/156115/5 "2020-06-30T07:47:26Z")

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> [@Stephen](#):
>
> How unpleasant is the fix?

Just to close the circle here, a fix here is massively extremely unpleasant, backend never actually counts specifically how many posts you have unread, it relies on a delta of `highest_post_number` and the last `post_number` you visited in topic users.

If I had to put a number on this, if my only job was to fix this bug it would take me **multiple months** to fix and I would have to invent a custom data store to get it going. Running a `count(*)` query on every unread topic is off the table.

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