I keep seeing old topics reappearing in Discourse, apparently having been changed in some invisible way by McNeel staff (@wim, @dale et al). Are you doing some updates in the background which don’t show up in the diff? 
In one extreme case the same topic was updated (with no changes) 4 or 5 times in the space of a few days. I got notifications each time as I had replied to the topic. Another time I helpfully replied to a 5 month old question 
What’s going on? 
Do you mean in the notification area, @Dancergraham?
What is the icon before the notification?
If it is icon for editing that’s an old issue and no one really cares about fixing it.
Recently I notice another bug. I get notifications with reply icon from the author of a thread I have marked as “Watching” without any reply from the author. He’s probably adding bookmarks and I get notified about it.
Isn’t it that when someone replies, it will go to the top again?
Hi - we have a few ways of tagging threads to be able to keep track of what we, well, need to keep track of.
This system is supposed to be transparent to the users and I thought this had been fixed. In which way are you notified? Also, that should only happen if you are the OP of a thread…
Hi @wim,
This post appeared in my normal ‘latest’ feed this morning, apparently because Dale had made a change, but I can’t see the change. I am ‘tracking’ that category, and have been for some time so that is nothing new. Could that be part of the reason?:
The below thread had 7 invisible McNeel updates and I got a notification in the top right corner of Discourse (the notification area?) every time, plus email reminders if I didn’t read it in time. I am ‘watching’ that thread because I have replied in it.
I am a ‘Regular’ since late January. Is there now some kind of visibilty above level 3 in there? This feels like a recent thing (last week or two). I don’t recall this happening before.
I get this icon, relating to the original posting:
Thanks, @Dancergraham.
I take it that you mean this:
Our tagging system will, indeed, bring posts to the top. I tend to only check “New” and “Unread” and don’t pay attention to what’s on top in that list (with the disadvantage that when a user updates an existing post, that will go unnoticed by me).
Yes, but that’s not what’s causing you to get notifications on that one.
As a Regular, you modified the original post of that thread:
and I suppose that is what is causing you to get those update notifications.
Goes with the territory…
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Could you specify in which cases you are getting “balloon” notifications (as in the following picture) that are annoying?
Hi @wim,
The annoying part is that I want this (1) or whatever number to appear only according to my settings. If OP has bookmarked or liked a post in his thread I should not get notification. If McNeel staff has marked a thread I should not get notification.
I don’t want to click on my avatar and see that the notification is not something I can or want to see.
e.g. recently you’ve been marking pretty much all my threads. I assume you are building a knowledgebase and you find my threads interesting, so that if someone asks a related question you can give my thread’s links as example/answer. That’s fine, but I don’t want to see that. Unless I see what exactly it is that you’ve marked. Positive? Negative? Helpful? Disciplinary? Either all the information or no notification, simple as that.
This is not transparency
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Ahh yes and I think I must have added a Python tag to another so I get random updates about that one as well. It is a shame that the ‘Latest’ tab is distinctly unreliable due to this.
Here are the most recent examples @wim:
@behforouzk, did not reply, yet I got a notification that he did.
@stevebaer, simply marked my thread, yet I get a notification that he performed an edit.
We have an internal system of “unhandled” tags that we use to help us quickly track posts. It must be the removal of this tag that is messing with the notification system.
@dan, I thought we had this working so people weren’t getting notified, but maybe I’m just imagining the past. Is this a regression that we need to let the discourse team know about?
I think this is a bug. If it is indeed the case that the adding or removal of the unhandled tag bumps the topic even for those that do not see the tag (and I suspect you are correct that is what is causing this), I think we need to tell the good people at Discourse. I’ll point them to this topic.
UPDATE: I’ve asked the Discourse developers for some help with this.
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Just a quick update: the good people at Discourse are working on a fix for this bug.
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Discourse has reported to us that they have fixed this issue.
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Does that mean it’s already in discourse.mcneel or that they have found and will fix it in some new release?
Saying this because I still get reply notifications when original posters decide to edit their posts.
The fix is already in. Note that this is only about us (McNeel) tracking topics by modifying a tag that is not visible to the users.
Could you post an example of this?
Could you please post a link?