Solution of GitHub Notifications Show “Unread Messages” but Nothing Inside

[orz-ai]

Select Topic Area

Bug

Body

Recently, I ran into a strange bug on GitHub:
My notifications page showed unread messages, but when I clicked in, nothing was there.
It looked like a notification counter bug.

It's quite annoying to see those blue dots.

Here’s what it looked like:

---

How I Fixed It

I fixed this issue by marking all notifications as read using the [GitHub REST API](https://docs.github.com/en/rest/activity/notifications?apiVersion=2022-11-28#mark-notifications-as-read).

You can do this with a simple curl command:

curl -L \
  -X PUT \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR-TOKEN>" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  https://api.github.com/notifications \
  -d '{"read":true}'

💡 Important:
You must use a classic personal access token for this API to work.
It does not work with:

• GitHub App user access tokens
• GitHub App installation tokens
• Fine-grained personal access tokens

You can generate a classic token here:
👉 https://github.com/settings/tokens

---

Example Response

After executing the request, you’ll get a response like this:

I actually used Postman instead of curl : )

---

Final Step

After running the API call, simply log out and log back into your GitHub account.

You’ll notice that:

• All your unread notifications are cleared
• The unread count (number) might still look wrong temporarily, but all the blue dots will disappear

Like this:

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[DmitrySadovnikov]

Hi @orz-ai,

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

[Emerentius]

The solution using the GH cli worked great.

In my case, the issue returned by gh api notifications\?all=true | jq -r 'map(select(.unread))' showed that the mention came from a repo that is hidden to me (notify-ycombinator/ycombinator), so apparently it's a bug where the mention counter doesn't take into account visibility correctly.

Interestingly, this particular repo seems to be related to a scam. The issue I was mentioned in was titled "Y-Combinator | $30M Y-Combinator W2026 with GitHub".