For bulk actions, Discourse has an option to “Perform this action silently”, which prevents users from seeing tracked threads bumped as a result of the action.
A possibly (quite probably) unrelated data point:
Last night (about 13 hours ago), my "Latest" list suddenly was full of closed topics.
I refreshed the page and the same old topics came up again.
Intrigued, I opened one topic, specifically New forum onlin, and saw that it had been closed back in 2021.
I couldn't make heads nor tails of it last night, but in light of this topic I just looked at it again. I searched through my history list (which is how I found the topic above) and noticed something odd in the preceding URLs and managed to reproduce what I'd seen.
In the light of day, what I'd done was now obvious: the "Latest" list was sorted in ascending order (see the ^ to the right of the "Activity" column). I clicked on "Activity" to change the sort back to the default descending date sort, and everything went back to normal.
How this would manifest in 2024 posts suddenly appearing in the "New" list is not obvious to me. But I thought I'd throw it out there and see if it sparks an idea in someone else's brain.
Can you provide a reference link for that? I'm not aware of anything by that specific name.
There is the "Disable category edit notifications" setting, which prevents the topic being bumped and watchers receiving a notification when a maintainer changes the category of a topic. I did use this setting during the massive number of recategorizations that were required for the category restructuring campaign that occured around the start of the year (Updated web site 👍).
However, in times when we aren't doing such a thing, I prefer to avoid the use of the setting as it is good to be transparent about recategorizations.
I don't see any recent activity related to that topic so I don't have an explanation for this.
It seems that it might only be available for bulk closing of topics:
I'm pretty sure I somehow reversed the sort order on "Latest" and just didn't notice; the 2021 closure is a red herring. I was just seeing the oldest topics in the forum. I've tried to imagine (and failed) how something similar could have been accidentally toggled in "New" to produce a similar effect.
Here is a Nov 2024 post I just got in my Unreads.
https://forum.arduino.cc/t/keep-blowing-up-nanos/1319012/7
I don't see any recent activity in that topic so unfortunately I don't have an explanation for this.
You may see more timestamp data than us - that's just about 6 months ago - Nov. 7th.
That particular topic suddenly showing up in "Unread" might be explained by it just being closed 51 minutes ago (6 months after last activity) and having "Consider topics unread when they are closed" checked.
I turned that off after someone pointed it out earlier today. Perhaps it takes some time for the settings to percolate to the server?
Possibly. Wild speculation: maybe it's a setting that only gets updated when you log in?
I log in a lot; I don't hang around after I clear the backlog.
I've never observed the behaviour but I just did a check. There were 14 new topics; each of them less than 12 hours old.
And I never log out.
That is under Unread, not under New. It's normal behaviour although I personally find it annoying.
- "Ah, an unread topic".
- Click "Unread".
- swearwords here it's only because system closed it.
- Dismiss
That one at least fits the 180-day closure theory. The one I just noted closed on 9 Jan 2025, so...
Fully agree, this is a new wrinkle in the continuum, for sure. It's getting annoying.
I raised it as a separate topic because the suggested solution (unchecking a tick box) had already been done, AND because in this case, the period is not related to closure date, so it speaks to a broader issue.
AFN, but more occurrences will be posted here, in case anyone ever goes looking.
In this case at least it was in the Unread, not the New.