⚠️ NOTIFICATIONS HAVE BEEN BROKEN FOR YEARS

[aleksey-hoffman]

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Bug

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Some notifications become "read" automatically, even if you never view them or open them via email. You just miss some notifications because the system read them for you.

Hundreds of people have reported it, and here's a 2024 post of someone saying this been broken for years https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/144794

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[ritish404]

This seems like a serious UX issue. Notifications should only be marked as read based on explicit user actions, not automatically.

Possible causes could be:

Sync issues between email and web notifications
Background processes incorrectly updating read status
Race conditions across multiple sessions/devices

It would be helpful if GitHub could clarify the expected behavior here or provide a setting to disable auto-marking.