unread message counts not syncing between desktop and mobile

Stream: Zulip meta

[Kim Morrison]

Has anyone else experienced this? I've been away from a desktop machine for two weeks, and coming back, the zulip unread counts are completely different from what I see on both my laptop and mobile app.

[Kim Morrison]

I've reloaded the page, logged out and logged back in.

[Kim Morrison]

Any suggestions for things to try?

[Kim Morrison]

Oh, hmm, now on mobile it shows the same (large!) unread counts that the desktop was showing. So I guess everything is in sync again, just "wrong".

But someone from Zulip will be able to comment whether this is a known bug.

[Alya Abbott]

It sounds like the mobile app was originally in a loading state where the counts hadn't updated yet.

Can you say more about why you think they are wrong now?

[Kim Morrison]

I'd been using mobile only for about 48 hours. It was successfully tracking unread state during that time. (Over many separate sessions.)

When I turned on the unused desktop machine today, all my unread counts reset about 48 hours back in time.

[Kim Morrison]

(i.e. lots of stuff I definitely read in the last two days was marked as unread again)

[Alya Abbott]

Hm, could you check how messages are configured to be marked as read on mobile? That seems like helpful context.

[Patrick Massot]

I had the exact same issue yesterday (or maybe the day before). So this may be something new.

[Kim Morrison]

Alya Abbott said:

Hm, could you check how messages are configured to be marked as read on mobile? That seems like helpful context.

Both desktop and mobile are set to "always".

[Alya Abbott]

This is very puzzling (and sounds frustrating!). I've flagged it to our engineering team for investigation, and will let you know when we have an update.

[Anders Kaseorg]

Do you have any muted streams or topics? This could be https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/3589#issuecomment-559248073.

[Kim Morrison]

Anders Kaseorg said:

Do you have any muted streams or topics? This could be https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/3589#issuecomment-559248073.

No, it's not that. I have many muted streams, but my problem was unread statuses in individual topics being reverted.

[Tim Abbott]

So we really only have one normal mechanism through which messages can be bulk-marked as unread, which is the "mark as unread from here" option. Do you use the combined feed view?

If you did a "mark as unread" while scrolled up in the combined feed at a scroll position where only a single conversation was visible, that could produce this symptom.

[Tim Abbott]

I'm not aware of other mechanisms via the Zulip API that would cause messages that had previously been marked as read ot be marked as unread again.

[Patrick Massot]

I also saw the bug and indeed I use "mark as unread from here" a lot when I want to go back to some thread later.