A bug was reported in Discourse’s review queue where, when viewing the second post in the queue via notification links, its body incorrectly displays the content of the first post—even though the actual post content differs. This misled moderators into thinking users were spamming identical messages. Philip_Montgomery reported the issue and provided screenshots illustrating the mismatch. simon reproduced the bug, confirming it occurs specifically when accessing review items via notification dropdowns, not via the sidebar’s Review link. The bug appears to involve UI state not updating correctly after navigating between notifications. ted acknowledged the report, credited simon for the investigation, and confirmed a fix has been merged into Discourse core via PR #23709. The issue affects forums using post approval for new users and may cause moderators to wrongly block legitimate posts.
We have a small/medium traffic public forum where we require that the first post from a user must be reviewed before it can be posted. (Before we added this requirement, we were getting an obnoxious amount of spam)
Anyway, one of the moderators reported something that sounds like a bug:
If there are two messages in the review queue, when you look at the 2nd message it looks like the content is identical to the 1st message. However, if you actually view the 2nd message you can see the body is different.
(She had thought people were creating new accounts and posting the same message repeatedly so she was blocking the latter posts for a while before realizing that the UI wasn’t showing what they actually wrote.)
This seems like it’s a bug, correct?
Attaching are some screenshots highlighting what she was seeing as additional messages because the forum is telling me that new users can only post a single image…
Just in case it’s relevant, is the moderator who is finding the issue a regular moderator, or are they a “category moderator”?
The screenshots definitely indicate an issue. I haven’t been able to reproduce it yet though. Any additional details you can think of about the issue would be helpful.
Edit: maybe this is it. Testing on my local dev site, two posts from new users are in the review queue. Instead of visiting the review queue directly, if I click the first review item from my notification dropdown I get this:
After clicking the second notification, the title of the item in the review queue gets updated, but the body of the post is displaying the text content of the previous review item.
If instead of going to the review items by clicking the review queue notification I click the “Review” entry from the sidebar, the review items are displayed correctly:
