Since years my "Unread Posts" list is garbled every now and then. Last month I got 5 "unread" posts from the Spanish forum, which I don't read. Fortunately these threads went away with my next login, but others can not be ignored even by marking them as "Not Following", this setting is reverted almost immediately
Now I had such a stray thread again, ending with a merge notification of the mod. Can it be that merging threads can garble the IDs or list of watched threads?
Can this annoying behaviour be fixed? Most probably with such an event I'll lose track of threads where other users wait for a response...
The problem persists and gets more annoying. Yesterday evening I got 2 false notifications from forums I never knew they exist, this morning I get another 3 notifications from unrelated forum sections. And none for the topics that really deserve my attention!
It's most likely not really a bug, but a "feature".
You probably are the victim of some newbies posting in random threads you might have viewed at one time.
These posts will be moved/split to the most suiting section, and if possible thread.
But then that thread will inherit the flag from the original thread, telling the system that you are following that one too.
I agree it's a real annoyance to say the least.
This is most likely caused by forum software which wasn't well matured when adopted by this site, and heavily modified to suit their needs and/or wishes.
So the problem to fix is these newbies dropping their questions wherever they happen to land on this forum.
And to unravel some 3 years of modifications and updates to these modifications (or whatever) to the forum software.
Or replace it with software that lets you handle a community as large as this one, with the same price tag (zero).
And even then the modifying will start all over again.
It's a serious bug in the user database if notifications don't match the website display. In the last two days I did not get any Unread messages, while topics clearly were displayed with the "personal" icon and marked as "New", i.e. requiring my attention.
Another bug is the inability to mark topics as "Not follow". In fact a change of the topic notification level never worked for me, so that I never could mark unrelated/unwanted topics as unwanted.
I'm willing to assist in hunting these bugs, but it's a very bad indication if nobody even cares about error reports. When can we expect a breakdown of the entire forum if nobody cares?
The notification for this topic was the first and only correct notification since about a week, amongst about 10 false notifications. Not a good success rate
