So… You know how unread topics will show numbers in either grey or blue if there are unread posts in those topics, right?
I have this one user who is being driven nuts because he can’t make the grey numbers go away. These topics are constantly in his unread list. He swears he has looked at every post in these topics.
His theory is that someone he has muted or ignored has posted in those topics, so the grey number represents posts that are unread because he can’t read them. Obviously, this shouldn’t happen and I’m not convinced he’s right. But they’ve got to be coming from somewhere.
He reports that if he stops tracking the topic and then starts tracking it again, that usually solves the issue, but not always…
That is a reasonable sounding theory. I’ll test it out and see what I can find. If you have any more details about what is going on, please let us know.
Testing this with ignored and muted users on the latest version of Discourse, what I’m finding is that replies to a topic that I’m watching show up as unread posts in the topic list. Replies created by an ignored user also cause the topic to show up in my Unread list.
Visiting the topic removes the reply count though. I think that this is the expected behaviour, but I could see how users might expect not to be shown any details about replies created by muted or ignored users.
What I’ve found doesn’t seem to explain what is happening to the user on your site. What they are describing sounds similar to the issue described here: Can't dismiss unread if last post is an assign or whisper. That is a bug that has come up a few times, but I’m not able to reproduce it on the latest version of Discourse.
