Erroneous "Unread post" indications

[John Liddle]

Am I the only one finding that channels keep popping up showing the flag indicating that they contain unread posts when in fact there are none?

When this happens, clicking "Show channel as read" does not clear the flag and the only thing that seems to work is opening one of the posts, coming back out of it and then "Mark as read" will work. See illustration below.



Channels show as having unread posts.


Channels1.JPG

But when you select one of them, there are no unrerad posts!


Channels2.JPG

I'm confused!

Win 10 & Firefox, both up to date.

[MartinEOS]

Hi John, what happens if you logout then log back in again? I've spotted it happen once myself and another user reported it, but it's a random intermittent issue, the worse type to track down. There used to be issues in earlier versions when the read status was stored in cookies both with the size of cookie and the fact many people block them, but it now stores it in the database so those issues should have gone.

I think I fixed mine by marking all channels read and the issue here has not returned.

Looking at the vBulletin support pages problems were last reported with version 5.2.1 and was supposedly fixed in 5.2.2 (we are on 5.5.5) it's possible that some bug has been re-introduced since fixed in 5.2.2 but I can't see any reports about it after and 5.5.5 has been out for a few months now.

[John Liddle]

Hi Martin - loggoing out and back in does not change things I'm afraid.

I shall go through the exercise of getting all channels to show that they have been read and then see what happens.

[John Liddle]

Hi Martin - I'm afraid that this issue persists - is there anything else I can try?

[MartinEOS]

Hi John,

It's happened a couple of times to me - but being such a random thing, tracking down the cause is going to be difficult. I initially thought the cause may have been the stressed old server not being able to record the data in time, but it has happened at least once since the site has been on the new server and there have been absolutely zero database issues recorded in the logs since the server move.

As I said above there were some reports with earlier version 5 doing it but vBulletin though they had cured it about version 5.2.5 (now on 5.5.5 here) nothing mentioned since about 2017. As it appears to be very random an in my case infrequent finding the trigger for them is likely not worth their effort / time.

It may be something they fix in future versions by accident when they do changes to something else, or it may disappear with future upgrades and then come back with others like it has in previous versions.

All you can do at the moment is use the "Mark all channels read" at the bottom which will reset everything and hope it doesn't do it again.

[John Liddle]

Thanks Martin