Please remove notifications from deleted repository

[Doublonmousse]

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I was seemingly mentionned in a repo that was probably spam and quickly (gitcoinmember/gitcoinmember) and I now always have the blue bot for unread notifications with no way to remove it because the notification doesn't exist anymore.

Could you systematically remove notifications from mentioned users in that case ?

[github-actions[bot]]

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[Chilinot]

I have the exact same problem, but for some other crypto scam crap. I can see the name of the organization and the repository, but i cant see the actual notification, so i cant get rid of it 😠

[Chilinot]

This is what it looks like for me

[Chilinot]

For anyone else having this issue, this tool helped me https://github.com/emmanuel-ferdman/gh-gonest

[Disinterpreter]

Tech-support answer:

Regarding the phantom notification, we apologize for any confusion or frustration this may have caused. One possible explanation is that a user account that mentioned you in a thread has been flagged for potentially violating our Terms of Service. When this happens, the content is hidden from view, including the notification, to protect the privacy of the user account and prevent further violations.

As a workaround, if you're familiar with the GitHub CLI, you can use the script below to mark all of your notifications as read. This may take care of the phantom message, but please note that the 1-0 of 1 message may still persist after the curl command is run. Our engineers are investigating this bug as well.

Running the script to mark notifications as "read" is generally considered safe, as it does not remove the notification itself, only updates the status of the notification. Here is the script:

gh api \
  --method PUT \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  /notifications \
 -F read=true 

If you have a Personal Access Token (PAT), you can also use the following curl command to mark all of your notifications as read. Please note that in order to use the curl command, you will need to replace $TOKEN with your own PAT, which you can create here. Also note that the PAT must have the notifications scope.

curl -X PUT \
-H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" \
-H "Authorization: token $TOKEN" \
https://api.github.com/notifications

For your reference, here is the documentation for the Notifications REST API endpoint.

In saying that, I fully understand that you may prefer to wait for a bug fix. Please note that the fix for this issue is complex, and I cannot guarantee a timeline for its implementation.

[fdwr]

This worked for me today to get rid of a persistent "ycombinator" repo notification, always showing an empty list despite saying there was 1 notification:

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 '{"last_read_at":"2025-10-01T00:00:00Z","read":true}'

From https://gist.github.com/homelab-alpha/e0f265a9c9b20ca786bce2327ce87060.

I had to generate one of the classic PAT's with "Notification" permission, as I couldn't figure out what permission to add for the less useful new ones. Also I got an error "Problems parsing JSON" trying from the normal cmd.exe, but it worked from git bash.

[FlooferLand]

This happened to me as well with that same repository.
It seems they mentioned about a thousand different people.

gh-gonest can help remove it, but dear god I hope GitHub just adds a "mark all as read" button