Notifications dot sometimes does not appear

[gwwar]

When folks have new notifications sometimes they do not see the orange dot on Calypso or on a Site masterbar. Investigate to see if the clients are marking items as read too early, or if this is an issue with related endpoints.

Originally reported by @wensco and @dougaitken

[dougaitken]

My main scenario around this is being on some *wordpress.com site and seeing a notification coming through on my phone via beta WordPress.com iOS app. I see the alert on my locked screen, and go to a tab with a p2 or the main Reader, however rarely when I get to a tab with the notification bell, does it have the unread orange dot. I open the notifications panel, and all the pings are still there highlighted as unreal.

Will look to reproduce as best I can over next few days. Thanks

[wensco]

Some additional troubleshooting notes in case they are helpful....

• I uninstalled the mobile app (Android, v alpha-73) since I was getting notifications there but not in a web browser, thinking that the mobile app notif might possibly be somehow suppressing the browser notif but there was no change in the browser behavior.
• I tried using Safari (my normal browser for work use is Chrome). Initially, I seemed to be getting notifs there but then I noticed that I wasn't always getting them reliably.
• Going back to Chrome, I noticed that there were multiple times where I saw the orange notif dot in Calypso (or the related notif in wp-admin/network admin) but it would disappear within less than a second, as if it was read. On occasion, it would persist but disappear if I changed tabsor refreshed the page.
• I also tried the desktop app (v 2.8.0) and can discern no pattern of behavior there - sometimes, the orange dot shows on the app icon in the dock and sometimes it does not. The notif within the app generally showed, but that requires me to manually check the app to see it.
• I re-installed the mobile app so that I can at least get notifications without having to manually check things.

[kwight]

After a similar sounding Slack report (p1507650135000110-slack-notificationz) today, I took a look to see what could be causing this.

It appears to be masterbar-specific. If I get a notification while in an active tab with a masterbar, a call to notifications/seen is fired right away, and the orange dot will not appear. Getting a notif while the Calypso tab is active will behave as expected (orange dot appears), but as soon as I switch to the masterbar tab again, the notifcations/seen call gets made, and the dot disappears (for all of my clients, Calypso tabs and mobile apps included, which makes sense). I haven't been able to determine where that call gets made yet though, or why – @roundhill , can you get further than me on this?

[wensco]

@kwight or @gwwar any idea on how to get this fixed or any sort of time line?

[kwight]

@wensco Kerry is on holidays for another week, but we'll try to get it sorted ASAP.

[roundhill]

I haven't been able to determine where that call gets made yet though, or why – @roundhill , can you get further than me on this?

Taking a look at this now!

[thehenrybyrd]

I'm also having trouble with the notifications dot not appearing. At the moment, the issue appears to be isolated to the masterbar, where the orange dot appears only briefly. Once the site (such as my team p2) is done with the initial load, the dot disappears. That also means the dot disappears on sites (such as logged-in WordPress.com) where I don't see the masterbar. So, if I load WordPress.com first, I'll have the orange dot there. If I load a p2 first, the dot will disappear, notifs are presumably marked as seen, and the dot doesn't appear in other places after that.

I don’t see any warnings or errors in the JS console, either, though there are a bunch of [Violation] if I don’t filter out verbose.

Chatted with @dmsnell about this a bit, he and @kwight say it sounds like the tab with the masterbar open is sending a call to seen, which would then trigger the dot being cleared.

Let me know if there's any other info I can grab from my browser - this is happening quite regularly, so I think I'll be able to reproduce as necessary.

Edit - sorry for the delay, this is the report @kwight mentioned a few days ago.

[roundhill]

I have a fix coming for the master bar dot disappearing. We'll review and deploy on Monday ;)

[roundhill]

The fix for the disappearing master bar dot has been deployed. We still have more to do with syncing the seen state, but for now it should work as expected for most.

[rodrigoi]

I'm reopening this issue because it's back. Or was never completely fixed. The bell icon does not have a consistent behaviour between Calypso and the Masterbar, apparently depending on a variety of factors including browser focus, number of unread notifications and notification types. Will try to get repeatable steps for a couple cases.

[rodrigoi]

related: #185