Bug: ghost notifications

[jackrosenthal]

See the screenshot. I must have 5 notifications I cannot see, as the bell has the blue dot, and the pagination shows I'm viewing notifications "1-0 of 5".

Note I've tried clearing browser cache already.

[thinkjrs]

I shouldn't have any unread notifications or I have an unread notification I am unable to see. This doesn't seem device-based to me, as I'm getting the same notification behavior in the Github iOS app.

Exactly similar scenario from me @jackrosenthal:

I'm currently on Chrome 95.0.4638.54 running on an arm-based mac. I also get the same "ghost" notification via the iOS app:

[Seggan]

Can confirm, except for me its 1 notification

[kwent]

Can confirm here as well with 1 notification

[Lockszmith-GH]

Same here, not device specific, or app specific, or network environment specific.
Screenshots in the community post I asked about it (before I discovered feedback):

https://github.saobby.my.eu.orgmunity/t/blue-bell-stating-you-have-unread-notifications-but-i-cant-see-or-clean-it-up/211714

[thinkjrs]

I've been careful over the last few days to monitor this and can reproduce every time I clear out my inbox checking "done" on each item.

Two observations:

• I am left with a single ghost notification on whatever device on which I cleared the notifications.
• Other devices do not show the ghost notification blue dot, but do indicate an errant inbox count, while concurrently logged in, even on the same machine. See below.

Firefox used to clear notifications:

Chrome logged in at the same time:

I can also confirm that the mobile applications behave as Chrome does, above.

[GrimLink]

I am also experiencing this bug.
I also tried to clear any browser cache, nothing works.

[pizzolante]

I also have 2 ghost notification from this repo

edit: I've revoked all my other session and still have blue dot

[Lockszmith-GH]

Just noticed this is a discussion, anyone open an issue?

[Seggan]

Where?

[Lockszmith-GH]

right my bad - this is the only way to leave feedback for GitHub - strange that they don't expose an Issues section to the world

[hanskellner]

Experiencing the same issue on Safari v15.1

Notifications bell has blue dot and count is "1-0 of 2". Clearing cache doesn't change the outcome.

[Seggan]

Now the unreads disappeared...

[Lockszmith-GH]

so whatever github did on their end, cleared up your account from this issue ?
Because it's still shows on mine.

[Seggan]

Yep. As far as I remember I did not do anything, I just noticed it randomly.

[pizzolante]

Seem solved here. If have more than 25, can truly select all and mark as read.

[Wrandz]

Finally, thank you so much!

[robert-hh]

That worked for me as well. Thanks!

[ST-DDT]

If you don't have 25 notifications this doesn't work. You can add some more by going into Done and moving them back to the inbox.

• Go to Done
• Select all (checkbox)
• Move to inbox (button)
• Go to inbox
• Select all (checkbox)
• Select all X (blue link)
• Done (button)

[Dirreke]

Thanks very much. It's useful

[AntoineVDV]

Thank you!!! I had been trying to solve this for so long... Calling the API didn't give any result but this trick worked just fine 😌

[metalelf0]

Still seeing this issue on my end, and I can't fix it cause I only have 13 items in "Done". I've no clue where this ghost notification is coming from!

[Swoorup]

Another way is to select old notification and mark them as unread. That worked for me too.

[ukmo-ccbunney]

@Swoorup That finally worked for me too. I did this:

• Goto Done.
• Select all
• Move to inbox
• Goto Inbox
• Select all
• Mark as unread
• Mark as Done

That then finally fixed the ussue!

[imkingdavid]

This worked for me as well. I had to make sure I not only clicked the top checkbox to select all visible notifications on the page, but also click the "Select all X notifications" link that comes up next to it. That selected the notifications that were invisible as well, and I clicked Done and the count is now back at zero.

[KeremKoksal]

"Select all X notifications" must be clicked for this annoying workaround to work...

[luiswirth]

doesn't work for me :(

[metalelf0]

No unfortunately it's grouped as a single thread. Thanks anyway and sorry for the delay! Il gio 6 gen 2022, 16:15 Seggan ***@***.***> ha scritto:

…

Reply again, I marked the earlier one as done — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#6874 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABAGR3QGOPAJ62BX5HXZP3UUWW2XANCNFSM5G3Z3G5Q> . Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS <https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1477376905?ct=notification-email&mt=8&pt=524675> or Android <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.android&referrer=utm_campaign%3Dnotification-email%26utm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dgithub>. You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[Lockszmith-GH]

and another one

[solhuebner]

Same issue / opened a ticket today

[Lockszmith-GH]

Did you try this? #6874 (reply in thread)

[solhuebner]

Thanks for the suggestions but I need to be honest here for a moment. THEY need to fix it :) There are a lot of people affected and opened tickets. Mine was half fixed by sending me API call instructions that at least got rid of the "you have new notifications" icon but the count is still off... I mean what should I expect from an MS-owned company. Have you seen their patch days? ;) The support should involve one or more of the affected people (live session), fix the crap and give them a Github badge. It COULD be so easy but they just waste our time. Sorry for the rant but this is not one of those one-person open source projects.

[Lockszmith-GH]

Oh I agree! But realistically, I doubt they will ever approach someone for a live session. It would be too easy.

[AliMD]

Same issue with 4 ghost nitifications 😭

[Lockszmith-GH]

While we all really wish GitHub would fix this, realistically, by the way they ignored this thread completely, it probably will not be anytime soon.

As of now, the following is the only workaround that was succesful, but it requires you have enough notifications to switch on:
#6874 (reply in thread)

[AliMD]

Thank you, yes its work for me, probably give Microsoft's kids the responsibility of making github notifications ;)

[jlbruno]

I had the same issue as @Anonymitaet - if you are part of an org that requires single sign on, and you are not authenticated, you'll see the unread count includes notifs from that org but it won't show the actual notifications.

Just sign into any other orgs you are a member of to ensure you are seeing all their notifications.

[anharsaja]

Same issue / opened a ticket today

[camsteffen]

Obligatory "this still happens in 2024" comment.

[BartMassey]

Me too.

I am a member of something like 35 organizations, so the workaround suggested by @jlbruno is impractical for me unless I script it.

One blue dot that won't go away. One ghost notification in inbox. Maddening.

[BartMassey]

One clue is that the message count reads 1-0 of 1. This must mean something useful, I think?

[Sama-004]

Same here got a mail about ghost mention but nothing shows in notification tab

[SimonN]

I had this today, and I can pinpoint my case to a certain event: Yesterday, at 2024-03-05 03:28 UTC, I received a notification by email that "no198", a user who doesn't seem to exist anymore, commented on this gist that doesn't exist anymore. The comment mentioned 50 Github users, all in my username's alphabetic range (Sil... through Sin...), and said nothing else.

I assume: He was a spambot and he already got moderated. Still, his gist comment produced a ghost notification.

I'm posting this in hope that it's useful evidence for the Github devs. As usual for this bug, my list showed "1-0 of 1", and I couldn't list the ghost notification. The token/curl solution from 2022-05-31 worked for me, thanks! The unread/read solution from 2023-01-05 failed for me. I'm not a member of any organization.

[J08nY]

Same!

[Dirreke]

Did you guys recieve the email about an advertisement about fluence and FLT, ethier?

[FR98]

Same here, I got Starknet and Fluence coins notifications too

[ShayBox]

Same issue and gist, I forgot I got that email until I read this comment, that's absolutely what this is.

[Ghabry]

Yepp my guess was that this is the issue and here are others confirming it :)

[Zartaj0]

This is still happening in 2024

[GeorgeWL]

Just started getting this recently, one ghost notification

[MangoIV]

If only GitHub would be an open source app so we could actually fix this.

[BartMassey]

So we now have large-scale confirmation of the bug, a pretty good diagnosis, a workable but grotty workaround.

What do we do to get GitHub to fix this issue?

[ShayBox]

Someone to mass ping GitHub staff and delete the gist.

[Mikopet]

Still happening, and the curl command above does not solves it.

🔔 A mark all done button would be very fundamental, and hopefully would solve the problem...

[Mikopet]

@Martii here you go: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/activity/notifications?apiVersion=2022-11-28#mark-notifications-as-read

[Martii]

@Mikopet

Thanks. There certainly are a few extra things in the official docs vs. here in this discussion.

Would you be willing to give the above a try and report back? I realize you probably already did something like this but wouldn't hurt to try it all. I know how frustrating this issue can be. Someone mentioned me in a Issue or PR and a repo maintainer deleted it and I hadn't read it yet... that's how mine appeared.

[Mikopet]

tbh your code gives me error:

{
  "message": "Time values must be in ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ",
  "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/rest/activity/notifications#mark-notifications-as-read"
}

which is fun, cause running the date alone gives proper date string 😅

anyhow, I let this go. It already has consumed much more effort than it is worth...

[Martii]

Sorry about that... quotes drive me batty sometimes especially now with curl requirements... edited and used an alternate found form above using a function that has been tested here. The substitution finally happens in this form. Did mark all of my current notifications as read.

It's there for anyone to try at their leisure.

[JamesVanWaza]

If anyone else is having a problem, ping me will try to assist.

[BartMassey]

Hey, my ghost notifications came back! Fixed it using the API request, since I had scripted it last time. Here's my script in case someone wants to try it: use at your own risk.
https://gist.github.com/BartMassey/356ba118b561deb7168bca52c68836fe

This is ridiculous. Somebody who has a paying corporate account needs to escalate this.

[mattrobmattrob]

Confirming using this also worked for me. No other solutions in this discussion worked.

[mcanouil]

This does not solve the issue, it only removes the unread markers but the notifications are still in the inbox.

[mvstepanek]

The same as @mcanouil. It fixed the problem just partially.

[Martii]

Methodology did not work for me when it was first tried with my permutations off of the earliest found orginal, and de-bash'd by another here, weeks ago. In your partial duplication of the code you also definitely need the full -u formatting for at least the dozens of systems that we manage. Seems that the newest additions to this discussion haven't read it fully through when GitHub hides responses. i.e. expand link to find that it was already existing. 😸

[fn5]

Worked for me too. Weird theory is that it was related to a githubsupport.com ticket I had to lodge for a user abuse report. I have no way to access it - but could it be somehow overlapping?

Anyway, thankyou BartMassey for the script.

[korverdev]

I also ran into this. Dropping what I heard back from support here since it gives a bit of additional context on this bug as a whole:

We had a few reports of this bug last year, and our engineers rolled out a fix. However, we have received a few reports of this recently, and our engineers are currently working on a fix. I've gone ahead and added you to the internal issue tracking this issue. Hopefully, the engineering team will have it solved soon. In the interim, the curl command below will mark all of your notifications as read, clear the notification indicator, and with any luck, take care of that phantom message for you.

A few things to note:

In order to use this command a Personal Access Token (PAT) will be required and $TOKEN needs to be replaced by a personal access token you can create here: https://github.com/settings/tokens/new. [Creating a Personal Access Token](https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/managing-your-personal-access-tokens#creating-a-personal-access-token-classic) also has the steps to create a token. After it is created, replace $TOKEN in the command with your new PAT.
Note: Please ensure that the PAT has the notifications scope.
Please update the date and time to your current date and note the time values must be in ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ.

curl -H "Authorization: bearer $TOKEN" -X PUT -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" https://api.github.com/notifications -d '{"last_read_at":"2024-06-03T13:21:00"}'

You can also export the current date and time in bash by running:

export now=$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)

Then you can use the date and time variable in the curl command as follows:

curl -H "Authorization: bearer $TOKEN" -X PUT -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" https://api.github.com/notifications -d '{"last_read_at":"'"$now"'"}'

For your reference, here is the documentation for the Notifications REST API endpoint.

[BartMassey]

Thanks much for reporting this! Good to know they are actively working on a fix (presumably).

I've fixed the date format in my script to match ISO 8601 (although it seems to take the date format given originally just fine). Note that the date formatting in the curl command given by the Github person does not appear to be quite correct: specifying Z ("Zulu" time zone) requires -u to get the right time.

[kasper93]

Any news about this issue? It looks like GitHub is shadowbanning unverified(?) users. They can see their tickets, but no one else can. Except there will be notification for this invisible/inaccessible ticket.

There are two problems here:

1. GH is hiding valid issues and even project/repo owner cannot see them. And it happens to valid issues, that were nuked from our repo and we lost all history/comments. For example I can't foreground or background mpv from terminal after suspending it with Ctrl-Z mpv-player/mpv#14355 and I know for the fact that the reporter is not a bad actor, they may not have verified their account, but regardless the issue is gone.
2. Issues as described in 1. are still alive, because author can see them and I strongly suspect this is where ghost notifications are coming from. The issue is even bigger if you follow whole repository and from time to time new reported issues are "hidden"

I cannot know for sure if that's the case, because obviously I cannot see the issue to validate it, but it seems the most reasonable explanation where we get those ghost notifications. Also it is quite annoying to lost legitimate issues history. I understand spam filtering, but it is bit too much...

EDIT:

Funny, it even expanded the link to "hidden" issue to its title. It is still 404...

[sgf]

i have the same problem.