ghost notification?

[IggyP]

on this site, i have one notification alert next to messages....when i click to there is nothing listed?

[Jin-Soo Jo]

That number also includes your unread count for the Private Message inbox. Does your inbox have any unread private messages?

[IggyP]

hmm no but i when i just logged in now i saw 2 notifications but when i click to there still was none...but it went back to 1

went into inbox and selected all and clicked marked as read just incase that could help, but it didnt im still showing 1 notification i cant see, plus whatever the last sikeout was idk

[online68]

I often have this same issue. Says I have an alert but when I click on it there is nothing in there. Sometimes the alert just disappears. It's quite odd.

[Jin-Soo Jo]

It seems that there are indeed some ghost notifications in the DB.
Part of the matter is that they're legacy notifications that used to be in the "private message" system, another part is that the legacy notifcation was deleted, and thus not imported, but the two records (privatemessage & sentto) do not actually agree that the message was deleted.
In IggyP's case, it's a deleted reply notification from back in 2014-07.

Going to do some more digging and will JIRA it. Will probably need to run a query to clean these up, but it'd be nice to know where these record mismatches came from.

[Jin-Soo Jo]

I often have this same issue. Says I have an alert but when I click on it there is nothing in there. Sometimes the alert just disappears. It's quite odd.

Ah, you might actually be seeing one of the new notification features. If it's a notification related to a topic/thread (ex. reply, comment, subscription), and you open that topic, it'll "auto-dismiss" that notification.

So for example, you might receive a notification, but check the relevant topic before visiting the message center. Subsequent page load would have a decremented Messages count in the header due to the auto-dismiss, and you wouldn't see the notification in the preview center, as the default filter is "New".

You can view dismissed notifications in the "Notifications" folder by changing the "New/Dismissed" filter in that folder:

[Jin-Soo Jo]

Okay, made the JIRA: http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-15266
So basically the ghost message was one of the legacy notifications that were quick marked for deletion by the cron, but the cron haven't gotten around to it yet. We'll need to update the query to set the sentto record straight as well, and possibly run a query on our end and/or give the cron a kick.

Thanks for the report, IggyP!

[glennrocksvb]

Thanks for digging into this. I also have this issue where it says I have 3 notifications when I have none.