I’ve been trying to narrow down the symptom/cause here and I hope I’ve created the right combination.
This appears to be related to spotty connectivity issues with the client and/or website.
I kept having these ‘deja vu’ while reading news. Again, my habit is to start up in the morning either on my iPad, or in the web client depending on where I am. I then flick through stories, following some, oh hey shiney don’t comeback for 5 minutes type of thing, and I also tend to travel some. So i’m using less than stellar internet like a 3G tether or some horrible hotel’s ‘work 10m no-work 30m’ internet.
It appears if I lose connection, a lot of my content is pre-cached. So if I am reading, and there aren’t any pictures, things look normal. Then, I get called away or work for a living or whatever and then I come back and then hmm stories look familiar.
What I think happens is that somehow, the connection between me and you gets nuked, but your code functions great so I keep going and read everything only to have the counters not updated so everything is new again for me next time it actually reconnects.
So guess what I’m asking is a) is that possible or b) is there a way to poke the client / web app to notice the connection went tits up and say something? save the read/unread state? Just thinking out loud there on ideas to fix.