So it looks like in the last few minutes, the @system user locked a bunch of old topics (270 to be exact). Every time a topic is locked, merged, split etc… that action of locking or merging or splitting because an “item” in the thread causing the unread status to turn on.
Is that a setting I can turn off locally for my user, or something you can do globally for the forum.
I’ve discussed this with @RyanAtSense before about the nuisance then when a thread is split and merged, all of the previously read messages from Thread A that get merged into Thread B become unread.
I don’t want to turn off the auto tracking of topics I’ve read, but now that auto lock outs are being turned on, it means every couple day a bunch of 8 month old threads are going to become marked with unread topic. So basically @system is becoming the thread zombie where as I assume these auto locks was trying to stop the recent thread necromancy.
What are your current notification settings? Can you post some screenshots of what you’re seeing? I didn’t get inundated with much at all.
ETA: The actual auto-deleting that takes place should not trigger unread events. Those @system ones were because Discourse Support needed to step in and close some for us.
First - I’m happy to take this to DM if its just a me thing, but it felt like a function of the Forum which is why I posted publicly.
Two screen shots attached.
I believe the issue is the “Automatically track topics I enter” settings. It is my understanding that if I don’t track topics, they won’t appear as unread.
This is based on the fact that if I try to use the “Dismiss” button on the main forum page it states "Stop tracking these topics so they never show up as unread for me again"
The other problem is that if the Dismiss button turns off tracking, there actually isn’t a way to “mark all unread”, but then get future updates. So the current 270 “unread” messages I have, I guess I either need to individually read, or agree to “Dismiss” them meaning I won’t get updates on them.
In this particular case, it is probably fine to Dismiss those 270 as in concept, they are now locked, so there won’t be further updates to them, but assuming there were, I wouldn’t know.
I think this should remain in Meta. It’s bound to affect more than just you.
Here’s my settings to compare. The first one is the likely culprit for all those notifications, since basically every thread in the forum’s history was considered ‘New’:
I do (mostly) agree with Discourse’s approach to merging/splitting/closing status changes. If you’re watching a thread closely, you’d likely want to know if it was moved elsewhere or if it was closed/resolved. Of course, this can get a bit unwieldy if you’re watching a ton, but I use the Dismiss feature under Unread for that.
In any case, you shouldn’t get these en masse for thread closures as they’ll happen in the background and not be performed by a user, System or otherwise…or so I think. Ultimately, despite some notification annoyance, we think auto-closing out threads is the best decision to make going forward. WIth a product like Sense, information gets outdated very quickly and we do not want anyone led astray by old threads.
