Not sure if this is gonna sound nit-picky but it’s driving me crazy. I continue to have the issue where a bunch of topics I’m following randomly stop updating properly–they’ll move to the top of the list when I refresh, so I know there are new posts, but the titles are grayed out with no count of new posts next to it, and just goes right to the last post when I click, so I have to scroll up to figure out where I last left off (which is the most annoying part of the issue).
Before anyone suggests it, I am absolutely unequivocally not logged in on any other devices, and I’ve already logged off/on, opened the forum in incognito to make sure it’s not a cookie issue, unfollowed and refollowed the problematic threads, etc.
As best I can tell, it almost seems like reading one thread will break another (for example, the main 2024 election thread was working perfectly for me forever, then yesterday I clicked on the Trump live tweeting thread for the first time in months to browse it a bit, then boom, the election thread stopped updating correctly). Anybody else have this problem or am I a special snowflake?
I have this problem periodically, both here and on “other” Discourse forums. And I’ve tried the same things you have, along with some others, and have not ever found a fix.
The weird thing is that over on Unstuck it literally never happens. The only other Discourse forum I’ve really participated in at all is spiceworks, but I don’t post or browse often enough to even notice if the problem is happening there.
Is this happening in threads that you are “tracking”? (see screenshot below)
Does this happen when you a.) refresh the site fully or open it fresh, b.) when you open a browser that already has the site loaded and hit the “X new topics” thing, or c.) in both cases?
Firefox is the daily user, I’ve tried Chrome and Edge too (on Windows 10)
Tracking, yes, like gman, I’ve tried flipping Tracking off and on, no change
Also C, doesn’t seem to matter how I load the site/view the threads
I’ve also tried signing out, deleting all the browser cache/cookies for the site, and signing back in, no change. After all that I concluded that the problem was on the server side and decided to just live with it.
Are either of you moderately comfortable using browser dev tools to watch your network requests for latest.json (which you can trigger by clicking to, say, “unread” on the home page then back to “latest”) to see if the same thing is happening? (if it thinks your latest read post in an updated thread is higher than the number of posts in the thread) No big deal if you don’t as I still wouldn’t know a solution but it would at least clarify if this is the reason.
Also, does the issue appear to happen in specific threads?
Like, for me, I see this for my latest.json (this is Firefox dev tools):
So given those highlighted values, it knows there’s been 2 new posts past the most recent one I’ve read, but maybe for you guys that last_read_post_number is busted like in that Discourse thread?
edit: if you guys have ignored users, the guy does say at the end of that link that unignoring users seemed to help him.
And, just like the guy in the Discourse thread, the last_read_post_number (9089) is much higher than the highest_post_number (1217) in the latest.json file.
Yeah, if the server is telling you you’ve read up to post 9000 in a thread with only 1000 posts, that’s clearly a server side bug. That I guess this other guy tried to report to Discourse two years ago and they were unable to help with.
A fix would probably involve, like, going into the database and resetting these last-unread-post values, which sounds terrifying and risky.
I have had the same problem for a long time both here and on UP. The problem persists across devices using Windows, Android and iOS and also different browsers.
So interesting thing, I mentioned earlier that dipping into the Trump tweet thread yesterday fucked up a couple of other threads. It just so happened I was ignoring the Trump bot himself because even scrolling past his shit was pissing me off, and I only really wanted to read people’s reactions (and maybe unhide the Trump posts once in a while if it looked like I missed something worthy). So there definitely could be a connection there. FWIW, after un-ignoring Trump the problem persisted, but it’s possible the damage is already done.
Just as an update if anyone cares: It took several days after un-ignoring the Trump bot, but the election thread finally returned to normal for me.
Unfortunately I never did do F12 and look at that latest.json file, but I’m assuming it had my last read post number as something higher than the total number of posts in the thread, and it started working once the thread actually caught up to that number.
Since I don’t have any other ignored users on here, I’ll keep it that way and see if my watched threads continue to behave themselves. If so, I’ll assume that was the source of the issue.
