[ARCHIVED] Blue Dots Next To Discussion

[ktStreet]

I am part of a discussion. I have read all the replies that I can see, but on List View, the discussion still shows a blue dot, indicating that there are unread messages.

When I click on the discussion, I can see 14/14 read messages. However, when I click on the course homepage > Discussions, I can see 21 read messages and 1 unread message.

I don't even care about reading that one unread message that I can't seem to access. How do I get rid of the blue dot?

NOTE: I have tried marking the entire discussion as read. Canvas will not let me.

[chadscott · Accepted solution]

Howdy,

To manually mark posts as read, you have to enable the setting -

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Student-Guide/How-do-I-change-discussion-settings-to-manually-mar...

Cheers,

Chad Scott
Katy ISD

[ktStreet]

Hi,

Thank you for replying! I have already tried doing this... and it essentially does nothing. This is because I do not have access to view the unread notification. When I look through each of the discussion replies, not a single one has a blue dot next to it.

[DerekSands]

Currently have a similar blue dot issue. Notification shows that I have 2 unread posts, but have no unread posts in any discussion. This "unread" notification is getting very distracting. Also have 3 blue dots next to unopened discussions that won't go away. See attached screenshots. I do not have notification issues with my other course.

[richard-jerz]

I stumbled upon this discussion because I was in a Canvas course as a student, and the course used discussions.  Here is what I discovered in the Canvas course.

When I enter a discussion web page, all unread posts show with blue dots but then quickly change to white, meaning the posts have been read.  This is how the Canvas course that I was in was acting.  It has nothing to do with me, the student, actually reading anything. All that it says is "The student opened the discussion web page and Canvas thinks the student read all posts."

I think that this is a fundamentally incorrect design.  Only the student knows what they have "read" or "not read." Any new posts should be "white" to indicate that they are unread, and then the student can check off those specific posts that they have read, making them blue.  Blue should mean "I read this," and white should mean "This post is new and unread."  The absence of color should mean the absence of reading.  Canvas has this incorrectly reversed, where the absence of color means student activity.

Apparently, a system-level setting might affect this logic, but I am not an administrator, so I don't know.