For the past several days, I’m noticing that the forum “New” count is inconsistent. On the forum Home page (at this moment), I see this:
When I click on the “New” tab, it shows the list of new posts, but the count (and the list agrees) shows this:
If I return to the Home page, the New count matches what I saw in the New list, but if I refresh the page, the count goes back to the lower (incorrect) number.
I have cleared the browser cache, dismissed all new posts, and tried different browsers with no effect.
All the topics in the page agree with whatever the New count is, by the way. When New shows “3,” there are only three notations of new messages in subcategories (actually just one in this case, because I have some libraries muted)
We absolutely want to sort this out, but I am going to need a bit more details here, the implementation depends on a cache and in some conditions it can get out-of-sync so we need to figure out what triggers this.
Some sort of repro using multiple accounts would be amazingly useful.
Yes, there’s a screenshot here. Those have been muted for nearly as long as Plex has been using Discourse, but this behavior is recent. As noted earlier, it occurs with multiple browsers on multiple OSes, and the behavior is routinely reproducible, as described in the first and second posts in this thread.
You can force the situation by clicking ‘Dismiss New’ inside any forum category. I just did the following:
Logged into a second account (this account has NO muted categories). It showed 55 new messages at the top of the forum home page.
Clicked on a category that had around a dozen new messages.
Clicked ‘Dismiss New’ inside that category.
Clicked on the Plex logo to return to the home page. The ‘New’ count at the top was now ‘2’.
Clicked on the ‘New (2)’ link. The New page listed over 30 new messages.
Clicked on the Plex logo to return to the home page. The ‘New’ count at the top was now ‘New (33)’. (33 is approximate. I don’t remember the exact number).
I clicked on the ‘3 new’ link for the Desktop Players forum. When it displayed the list of new messages, there were 5, not 3 (there actually were 5 new messages. These were not posted in the past few seconds, but at least an hour prior).
Thanks for all the details. From them, I managed to reproduce the problem, and we have a fix in the pipeline. It should be deployed here first thing next week.
Some background, if you’re interested: the bug only occurs in a very specific scenario. You need to have used the Dismiss New button on a specific category and you must never have touched the ‘notification level’ on the category. Setting your category notification level to ‘watching’, and then back to ‘regular’ would work around the problem.
Tracking state doesn’t transfer to subcategories by design. That means users have the maximum flexibility when setting their preferences.
In some situations, people may want to mute a category, but not its subcategories. For example, on this forum, someone might want to mute #plex-players but keep track of topics under #plex-players:mobile-devices.
That said, I totally see your situation where it makes sense to have settings propagate down. We have had a few requests for this, including yours, so the feature might be developed in future. We have a topic on our meta forum which discusses the issue.
