Some tracked topics not showing up as unread

support
1

I’m posting this here and not in bugs as I have no clear steps to reproduce the issue - I’ve recently noticed that on the WaniKani Community forums (https://community.wanikani.com/) some of my tracked topics do not get marked as unread despite new posts being made, and I was directed here. Some of these topics have not been showing up as unread for several weeks now despite regular activity - they’ll show up in the Latest overview, but will be greyed out as if they’re already read. Some further details:

  • It’s consistently the same topics that fail to show up as unread
  • I’ve played around with the tracking options for these topics to no effect
  • I’ve confirmed that I do not have these topics or the categories they’re in set as muted
  • I do have one user set to ignored, but the latest post in these topics is not usually from this user, and other topics they post in show up as unread even when they are the last user to have posted in them, so this may be unrelated
  • The counter for the amount of unread topics is often wrong (both at the bottom of a topic and in the navigation menu), showing more topics than are actually unread - I initially chalked this up to the ignored user, but on closer look it seems the threads that are not showing up as unread may be counting towards the number of threads despite not showing up in the overview
  • A refresh (whether soft or hard refresh) does not change this behaviour, neither does logging out and back in

I have no idea what may have triggered this or whether it’s related to anything I did, but I didn’t find anything when trying to search for the issue. Does anybody have an idea what might be causing this and how I might be able to resolve this?

EDIT: I think I see a technical reason for this. In the JSON that comes back from /latest.json, for one of the affected topics I see

highest_post_number: 6561

but then I also see

last_read_post_number: 8819

for the same topic - so it appears for some reason Discourse is convinced I’ve last read a post that has not yet been made. This topic also happens to be an automatic continuation of a previous topic that exceeded the 10k post limit. I’m not sure if both these things are the case for all affected topics, but I’ll keep an eye on this.

EDIT 2: The same holds for another affected topic, with highest_post_number: 403 and last_read_post_number: 2334. This one is also a continuation of a previous topic.

A third one too - highest_post_number: 1402 and last_read_post_number: 6212. This one is not a continuation of a previous topic though.

EDIT 3 (last one for now I promise): Just for the sake of completeness, for unaffected topics I’m up to date with, the numbers (highest_post_number and last_read_post_number) match up. I think this mismatch is what’s causing the new posts to not show up as unread, but of course I can’t be 100% sure.

1 Like
4

The issue was resolved for quite a while, but has resurfaced. It’s affecting one topic so far, that I know of, the JSON response from latest.json shows the following for the affected topic:

{
        "id": 65108,
        "title": "WaniKani has officially stopped clicking my POLLs",
        "fancy_title": "WaniKani has officially stopped clicking my POLLs",
        "slug": "wanikani-has-officially-stopped-clicking-my-polls",
        "posts_count": 1867,
        "reply_count": 1577,
        "highest_post_number": 1868,
        "image_url": "https://global.discourse-cdn.com/wanikanicommunity/optimized/4X/1/7/f/17f7e88c4ebd69e1b8ea76b74625f8f8a17447ae_2_1024x482.jpeg",
        "created_at": "2024-03-02T23:27:05.198Z",
        "last_posted_at": "2024-03-11T06:12:55.262Z",
        "bumped": true,
        "bumped_at": "2024-03-11T06:12:55.262Z",
        "archetype": "regular",
        "unseen": false,
        "last_read_post_number": 4271,
        "unread": 0,
        "new_posts": 0,
        "unread_posts": 0,
        "pinned": false,
        "unpinned": null,
        "visible": true,
        "closed": false,
        "archived": false,
        "notification_level": 2,
        "bookmarked": false,
        "liked": true,
        "tags_descriptions": {
          
        },
        "views": 547,
        "like_count": 4970,
        "has_summary": true,
        "last_poster_username": "shuly",
        "category_id": 9,
        "pinned_globally": false,
        "featured_link": null,
        "has_accepted_answer": false,
        "can_vote": false,
        "posters": [
          {
            "extras": null,
            "description": "Original Poster",
            "user_id": 78576,
            "primary_group_id": 174,
            "flair_group_id": 174
          },
          {
            "extras": null,
            "description": "Frequent Poster",
            "user_id": 151896,
            "primary_group_id": 118,
            "flair_group_id": 118
          },
          {
            "extras": null,
            "description": "Frequent Poster",
            "user_id": 13491,
            "primary_group_id": 214,
            "flair_group_id": 214
          },
          {
            "extras": null,
            "description": "Frequent Poster",
            "user_id": 69207,
            "primary_group_id": 171,
            "flair_group_id": 171
          },
          {
            "extras": "latest",
            "description": "Most Recent Poster",
            "user_id": 51836,
            "primary_group_id": 204,
            "flair_group_id": null
          }
        ]
      }

I gathered that the last time this happened, it was because the count would be off when a lot of replies to a post were deleted or moved, but since this is a relatively new topic I don’t think that’s the case here.

Incidentally, the issue seemed to resolve itself last time as I unignored the user I had ignored, and has now resurfaced very shortly after I ignored a user. It might be a coincidence, but I have a feeling ignoring users and post counts not matching up are connected somehow. Also interestingly, the user in question does not have any activity in the affected thread.