All of a sudden (past couple of weeks), I am seeing mostly 2024 old posts in my New list. Is this some sort of forum bug?
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Mine hasn't been that bad, though there have been a few. I thought initially they were related to people editing their previous posts, but no, it seems random.
My conspiracy theory - Arduino Forum is the victim of an AI that's run amuck (replaced @pert ?), and will continue to degrade. Sigh.
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Sometimes it's all the new. I didn't think of the AI, but wouldn't be surprised, just one more reason to hate AI.
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I think there's something going on, a breach perhaps. I base this on something I saw a couple of days ago, + @Grumpy_Mike said something about a lost answer or similar. Coincidence?
What are your settings for Preferences > Tracking? Specifically, if you have enabled the option "Consider topics unread when they are closed", what you are describing could be the result of automated actions or manual actions performed in bulk to close old threads.
Uncheck the last one.
Yes, and click "Save Changes". This should at least prevent your "New" stack from filling up when there are bulk closures of old threads.
Thanks, I did forget the Save Changes (at the very bottom of the page).
I think it is related to a poster who wanted his posts removed. So when that is done it leaves the rest of the posts that others produced. Therefore it becomes a new post and so that is why you are seeing yourself tagged in a new post from a few years back.
Not a bug in the forum software but a consequence of removing posts from this member.
I think that you may experience this if you do a search and land in an old thread and spend a few minutes in there but do not read the whole thread to the end, then the remaining items in the thread become treated as "unread" for you.
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There is a difference between unread and new.
There is also latest.
Where do you see the old topics?
If an old topic is moved it will at least show in latest; I can't remember that it also showed in unread or new. This happened in Dec 24 / Jan 25 when a bulk move was done as a result of the recategorising.
When system closes a topic it will show in unread and maybe in latest; I never scroll that far through latest to be sure.
I can count on one hand the number of searches I have ever done so I doubt that.
When I click on the New at the top.
All of a sudden (last week) >
I get e-mail notifications from a post that I never took part in and the post was the first from the OP?
No email, just checking the New at the top of the page.
Maybe someone else was kind enough to do the search and posted a link to it in their post which you subsequently clicked on.
Please provide links to some of these posts. We might be able to identify the specific reasons for that by looking at them.
It is true that we receive a significant amount of spam posts that are AI-generated. It is also true that when a topic receives a spam reply, this "bumps" the topic. The spam is typically removed within a matter of minutes, so by the time you visit the topic you might not be able to see any reason why it was bumped.
However, the volume of malicious AI-generated posts has not increased lately. And it is my impression that the volume of malicious posts has not increased since the advent of the AI era. The spammers just have a new way of generating the spam posts now. In my opinion, the switch to using AI-generated content for spam posts has actually been beneficial for moderation because this content has a very distinctive characteristic, which will immediately raise our suspicions. Previously, the spammers would usually copy/paste a relevant human written post from Arduino Forum or another platform like Stack Exchange (sometimes even doing things like automatically swapping words with synonyms to make the post content unique). Those posts were much more difficult to spot as malicious, both by the moderators and by the forum helpers. It was heartbreaking to find that one of these topics was only a vehicle for spam after the forum helpers had dedicated significant efforts to responding to a scumbag spammer.
As for "an AI", that is not really an accurate characterization of the situation, since the malicious posts surely originate from many different companies, not from a single AI. I'm not sure how much automation is used in their process. I wouldn't be surprised if it was still mostly human-driven (other than the generation of the text of the post).
I'm still here as always. It is true that we use an LLM to automatically detect spam posts:
However, although the specific Discourse AI system we are currently using is relatively new, it only replaces a different equivalent (but slightly inferior) system (Akismet) which was in use since 2021. We (the entire moderation team) still manually review every action taken by the system. So humans are still as essential in the management of the forum as has been the case since 2021. Prior to the migration to the Discourse forum framework in 2021, the management was a bit more human labor intensive due to the old forum framework's spam detection system being quite primitive (which meant far more false negatives which had to be managed entirely by humans), and due to the old moderation interface being a bit less efficient.
Yes. I did a careful search for the post. Even if it had been deleted, I would still have been able to see it due to having staff privileges.
Here is the discussion in question:
Occam's razor tells us that this was simply a case of a single human error (which is completely understandable), not some shady conspiracy theory. If a malicious entity had obtain the privileges necessary to delete posts by other users, why would they use those privileges to delete a single (or at least a small enough number that only one occurrence was noticed) random innocuous post, and thus risk exposing the breach before they had done anything meaningful with it? More likely they would either do their best to abuse the privileges covertly, or else make as large a disruption as was in their power all at once to take advantage of the small time window before such activity would result in the breach being closed and them losing the privilege.
There was a single occurrence of this months ago (a group of us discussed it in a direct message so check there if you want to refresh yourself on the details). It is true that this resulted in old discussions being bumped. However, that was months ago and there hasn't been anything else like that since.
Those bumps were a result of a large amount of manual work I did personally to preserve the valuable information that had been shared by other forum users on the affected topics. The forum software doesn't have any capability for doing such things automatically. So this is definitely something I would remember doing if it had occurred again recently (I'm still traumatized from the time I had to do it months ago 
).
Yes, this is another case (separate from the one @Grumpy_Mike) of when users might notice the side effects of forum maintenance. The one @sterretje is referring to was discussed here:
And another case of something similar here:
The forum maintainers periodically recategorize topics or fix breakage, even in old posts that we happen to stumble across, or receive a report about. However, there hasn't been any bulk campaigns such as the ones mentioned above recently, and the volume of sporadic maintenance hasn't increased recently.
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Aha! That's what a fake @pert would say too! 
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