"My updates" shows questions a user has not done anything on.

Question

This could be related to my previous question about the event streams (though it happened before I tried refilling the event streams).

Several users on my site have noted that some questions that appear in their "My Updates" that they have not had any activity on - i.e. they did not answer or comment or favourite the question.

Is there a way I can find exactly why the questions are appearing in their updates? I had a look in the database but can't get my head round what is where. Is it something inside the 'userevents' table?

UPDATE: I fixed the previous problem and ran the refill script to completion. Users are still getting unrelated questions in their updates page. How can I debug this?

Comments

Also, what are all the "entitytype" options? I looked up a questionid that a user reported in their updates, it lists 3 rows but none have their userid. The first row has the question-asker's id (3836), with a lstuserid of 1 (me) since I edited the question. Then there are two rows with T as the entitytype and lastuserid as the OP (3836).

Edit: now the question has been answered and there are 11 rows in total, with a bunch of users listed (now including the one who reported the problem).

Answer 1

The 'Refill event streams' button ensures that all appropriate events are present but it does not empty the event streams first. The reason is that some historical events cannot be reproduced based on the current state of the posts in the database, and I didn't want any of these housekeeping buttons to destroy valid data.

If you want, you can empty the qa_userevents and qa_sharedevents tables manually before running the 'Refill event streams' process.

As for why these users are seeing these posts, perhaps at some point they had favorited a related tag or category or user. See the entitytype and entityid values from the rows representing these events to see what their source was, comparing with the QA_ENTITY_* constants in qa-app-updates.php.

Comments

OK thanks, it must be because of favourite users/tags. If I fave a user I get different questions in the updates section.

I did actually empty the userevents table before refilling, but not the sharedevents one. What historical events are there that cannot be reproduced?

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I can't remember all the cases, but for example, if a question is edited at some point by one user, then retagged later on by a different user, the qa_posts table only stores information about the most recent change.

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OK thanks Gideon.