Persistent notifications for non-existent repository "ycombinaattor/-co"

[shelltea]

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Bug

Body

I'm experiencing a bug with GitHub's notification system where I consistently see an unread notification indicator, but when I navigate to the notifications page, no actual unread notifications are displayed.

Issue Details:

The notification badge shows unread messages
When clicking on notifications, the page appears empty with no visible unread items
The interface indicates that the notification is from repository "ycombinaattor/-co"
This repository does not exist (returns 404 if accessed directly)
The unread notification indicator persists and cannot be cleared through normal means

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[DmitrySadovnikov]

Hi @shelltea,

You can use the GitHub CLI to mark the notifications as read:

gh api notifications\?all=true | jq -r 'map(select(.unread) | .id)[]' | xargs -L1 sh -c 'gh api -X PATCH notifications/threads/$0'

To remove them from the sidebar, I used:

gh api notifications\?all=true | jq -r '.[] | select(.subject.title | test("(paradigm|Lido|gitcoin)"; "i")) | .id' \
| xargs -L1 -I{} gh api \
  --method DELETE \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  /notifications/threads/{}

If you don’t have the CLI installed, you can add it via Homebrew:

brew install gh

Github CLI Doc
Github API Doc

[shelltea]

Hi @DmitrySadovnikov,

Thank you so much for sharing your solution—it worked perfectly! I was stuck with that persistent ghost notification from a non-existent repository (ycombinaattor/-co), and your GitHub CLI commands cleared it right away. I really appreciate you taking the time to document and share the fix. It saved me a lot of frustration!

Thanks again!

[ShiJbey]

I have the same issue with a similarly named spam repo that does not exist, ycombin/ator. Unfortunately, GitHub doesn't allow you to remove repos from the repository section within the notifications page. The call to the API only removes web3 spam notifications.

This seems to have been part of a massive scheme to phish crypto from people: gbhackers article

[mattbailey]

Very bizarre, I also had this exact same broken repo show 1 notification. Thanks @DmitrySadovnikov for the fix.

[moraesc]

Hey everyone, this was likely caused by notifications from spammy repositories and users not being correctly hidden. I'm very excited to share that we just shipped a major improvement to how these notifications are handled, so you should no longer be seeing inaccurate notification counts for your repositories. You can check out our changelog for more details and feel free to leave any questions or feedback in this thread or in our community discussion post!