Hey folks. If your “Latest” feed looks like a time machine today, we want to give you a quick update on what happened behind the scenes.
During our ongoing Community Platform migration audits, we discovered a massive batch of duplicate topic titles. Duplicate titles cause severe routing and canonical link issues. To make them unique, we ran a backend script to append the original topic IDs to the end of the titles. This explains the random six-digit numbers you are seeing appended to older conversations.
The unintended consequence? The script caused the system to update the active timestamps. This bumped years-old conversations straight to the top of your feeds and triggered unread indicators.
The good news is the run is basically done. We had processed nearly 36,000 topics when we caught the reports today, with only about 40 left in the queue. The engineering team is working out how to adjust the parameters so any future data cleanups happen silently in the background without polluting your views.
How to fix your feed: We know this ruined inbox zero for a lot of you. To clear out the noise, you can navigate to your Unread tab and click the Dismiss button at the top right. This will mark all these zombie topics as read and clear out the notifications.
Apologies for the temporary chaos. Let us know below if you spot any lingering weirdness after today!