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Cannot mark as read one of my watched threads [MERGED]

jz0309 said:
... Something, but no, no response whatsoever ... hence my comment.
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Maybe you and I have a different interpretation of who qualifies as an "admin"... but by my count, there are about thirty or so posts by people with some form of the "Staff member" badge on their account, the two latest of which are both dated 7/17 -- only a couple of weeks ago. They are clearly aware of the issue, and tracking it right alongside the rest of us. Personally, I feel like that's much better engagement than I've gotten at other websites where I've participated.
 
jz0309 said:
the issue exists for over 1 year, site owners/admins have been ping'd multiple times by multiple people. There have been theories tossed around on what the issue is.
All that I and others have asked for is an acknowledgement of the issue and some explanation of what the root cause might be. Something, but no, no response whatsoever ... hence my comment.
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Exactly right. Some acknowledgement would be nice.

@zarmanto they could use a different product, since this forum is the only one of many that I visit that has this problem. This is pathetic.
 
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zarmanto said:
Maybe you and I have a different interpretation of who qualifies as an "admin"... but by my count, there are about thirty or so posts by people with some form of the "Staff member" badge on their account, the two latest of which are both dated 7/17 -- only a couple of weeks ago. They are clearly aware of the issue, and tracking it right alongside the rest of us. Personally, I feel like that's much better engagement than I've gotten at other websites where I've participated.
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from 4 months ago ...
1753990090261.png


so we have some sort of indirect acknowledgement that the issue exists, but nothing else ...
 
zarmanto said:
Maybe you and I have a different interpretation of who qualifies as an "admin"... but by my count, there are about thirty or so posts by people with some form of the "Staff member" badge on their account, the two latest of which are both dated 7/17 -- only a couple of weeks ago. They are clearly aware of the issue, and tracking it right alongside the rest of us. Personally, I feel like that's much better engagement than I've gotten at other websites where I've participated.
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Those posts are from staff members who don't seem involved in addressing the problem. They are just chiming in as users who have the same problem as the rest of us.

I do wonder why we've gotten no feedback about what's being done to address it. At this point we don't even know if the vendor has been contacted. I have a feeling something serious is going on and there's nothing safe to say about it. Perhaps the vendor is unresponsive or incompetent and Arn is trying to figure out next steps.
 
I decided to try a different approach to understanding this problem: I went over to post a query of my own directly to the XenForo support forum. Turns out someone else beat me to it, having had the same thought way back in January -- and someone else in that forum actually seemed more willing to offer insights at that time than the moderators were when I resurfaced the issue. (Perhaps it didn't help that I linked to a thread in which svenmany had just suggested that they might be incompetent... but whatever.)

The existence of the previous poster's question happened to be somewhat convenient on two levels; obviously it gave me the answer that the previous respondent had provided at that time -- which was that they believe the issue isn't likely to be their code, but rather, something in the backend database (as speculated earlier in this thread) -- but it also gave me an unexpected opportunity to test their assertion. Since that thread was posted well beyond the one month dormancy period that seems to trigger the problem, I specifically looked for the bug to occur on XenForo's own forum in that very thread, after I posted to it. (I know, I know... it was somewhat sneaky and underhanded -- but frankly, I'm okay with that, especially since they weren't even open to speculating on the issue.) Aaaaaand... interestingly, the issue did not occur on their instance of the forum.

I'm somewhat hesitant to speculate further on the core cause... but it seems to me that it would royally suck to debug if the issue is indeed in the database. Is it too optimistic to hope that maybe the MacRumors instance of XenForo is running on an older copy of their codebase, and just needs an update?
 
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I don't want to jinx anything, but this issue seems to finally be fixed? I was able to mark all 15 of my stuck threads as read earlier this week. Would be nice to get some official confirmation if it is indeed fixed.
 
UliBaer said:
No, it isn't fixed, I just had to mark a complete subforum as read again, just to get the stuck unread thread marked as read.

[edit] In this case it was this thread:
again!
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Ugh... I guess I do have 4 that are stuck unread now.

zarmanto said:
Navigate back and forth between the Watched Threads page and some other page on the site -- or maybe even just refresh the page; odds are, the problem will reoccur within two or three loads. (I experienced the same this morning.)
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Yep, I'm very familiar with how this works. On Monday, I marked all my threads as read (by clicking the individual 'Mark Read' button next to each thread on my watched threads page), and it worked for every single thread. I refreshed my page multiple times, started a new browser session, checked on another computer, checked again later, and couldn't believe my eyes that I no longer had any stuck unread.

Seems like it could have been a repeat of what happened mid-July when it started working for several people for a couple of days.
 
Probable debugging notice:

I just had the above mentioned thread stuck unread again and there was only one other thread unread in the subforum. I just read the other unread thread and after that also the stuck unread thread was marked read! :oops:

[edit] To trigger staff: @Weaselboy ;)
 
UliBaer said:
I just had the above mentioned thread stuck unread again and there was only one other thread unread in the subforum. I just read the other unread thread and after that also the stuck unread thread was marked read! :oops:
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Initial note: I have resisted the temptation to use the workaround of just marking an entire forum as read, until this very moment. For the sake of the discussion, I have chosen to abandon that preference, at least temporarily. It has been somewhat illuminating, I think. Having said that, here are some additional observations, along with some theories:

As you (and others) have noted, if you mark an entire forum as read and one of the affected threads is in that forum, the thread will indeed "lose" the glitched state and be marked correctly on the Watched threads page -- at least temporarily. I believe we can reasonably hypothesize that the glitched thread will present the appearance of normal behavior until another thread in that forum receives a new post -- however, this hypothesis seems to be incomplete; this only appears to be the case when the affected thread is listed on the first page of posts for that forum, consisting of the most recent fifty threads in that forum. If the thread falls dormant for long enough that it ends up beyond that first page, it appears that it can remain un-glitched until another unread message reaches the same page that has the glitched thread on it. (In some cases, this may not even be possible for a "fully read" forum, given that there are likely to be other dormant threads between the glitched thread and the most recent unread thread.)

Caveat: If a thread has been pinned, it seems that it can present the appearance of being un-glitched, even with new posts in threads within that forum -- however, I suspect that this reprieve may be lost when another pinned thread in that forum receives a new post.

These observations and theories are based upon my own experience with three threads in the iPhone forum and the News Discussions forum. One of my affected threads is the pinned iPhone cases thread in the iPhone forum, and two other affected threads were in the News forum. Since marking these two forums fully read while typing up this post, at least ten News threads have received new posts, but neither of those affected threads in News appear on the first page, and so they have not returned to a glitched state -- yet. Likewise for the iPhone cases thread; it remains un-glitched for now, but there are not yet any new posts in the other pinned threads; only in a few of the regular forum threads.
 
Probably jinxing it again, but seems to be fixed for me.

Edit: totally jinxed it. However it's fewer threads than it used to be (went from 4 to 1 stuck on unread)
 
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I suspect no one working on the problem is paying attention to this thread. For those with the time and interest to help troubleshoot, getting involved beyond this thread might help. Has anyone on this thread made direct contact with an administrator? Since people here can often easily reproduce the error condition (I can), that would be a great help to someone trying to debug.

This particular bug is not that important to me since I'm OK with marking all threads read now and again. If a bug that seriously impacted me were to arise, I would use more direct channels to get help.

For me, more interesting than speculating about the cause of the bug and the conditions that trigger it, would be speculation about why there has been no feedback at all from official channels regarding efforts to solve it and the status of things.
 
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WildCowboy said:
I don't have any updates on the issue. As mentioned previously, arn is aware of it and seems to the one who needs to investigate it, but I don't know what efforts have been made.
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I guess Arn has no support person to help him. He might not be able to figure it out or considers it low priority. It's probably a mix of the two.
 
zarmanto said:
Caveat: If a thread has been pinned, it seems that it can present the appearance of being un-glitched, even with new posts in threads within that forum -- however, I suspect that this reprieve may be lost when another pinned thread in that forum receives a new post.
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This portion of my theories has been proven incorrect by recent posts: newly unread sticky threads do not appear to directly affect a formerly glitched sticky thread alongside them. This may narrow the scope of potential sources for the issue.
 
svenmany said:
I guess Arn has no support person to help him. He might not be able to figure it out or considers it low priority. It's probably a mix of the two.
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You know, one person responsible for the health of the website is a serious risk. It does explain why this current issue has dragged on for over a year. If a more significant issue were to arise, or something were to happen to Arn to make him unavailable, this site would be down for the count.

I do suffer with a more serious issue. I've managed to work around it but had thought to open a thread on it. With this new understanding of the current administrative challenges, I won't bother raising it.
 
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svenmany said:
I guess Arn has no support person to help him. He might not be able to figure it out or considers it low priority. It's probably a mix of the two.
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He does rely on a team, but I do think he does a lot of the work himself. I'm unsure of how many irons he has in the fire, but he's not around in the forums much, so I suspect this might be more of a low priority for him
 
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