Unable to Clear Notification from Deleted Repository

[snowyu]

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Bug

GitHub Feature Area

Notifications

Body

Hello GitHub Support Team,

I am experiencing an issue with notifications on my GitHub account. I was mentioned (@) in several repositories, which generated notifications. However, these repositories have since been deleted, and I am now unable to access, read, or unsubscribe from the related notifications. As a result, the notification indicator (red dot) in the top-right corner of my dashboard remains visible, even after I have marked all notifications as read.

After investigating, I believe the issue is caused by the following deleted repositories:

• gitcoin-communlty/gitcoin-co
• gitcoindeveloperdao/gitcoin.com
• outcaster552/gitcoinpromosender
• gitcoinoda/org
• paradigm-ventures/paradigm

I have tried marking all notifications as read and checking all notification tabs (“All”, “Participating”, “Subscribed”), but the persistent notifications from these deleted repositories cannot be removed.

Could you please help me clear these notifications or otherwise resolve this issue? If you need additional information, such as screenshots or further details, I am happy to provide them.

Thank you very much for your assistance.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[queenofcorgis]

Hey there! 👋

Thanks for posting in the GitHub Community, @snowyu ! We're happy you're here. You are more likely to get a useful response if you are posting in the applicable category. The Accessibility category is a place for our community to discuss and provide feedback on the digital accessibility of GitHub products. Digital accessibility means that GitHub tools, and technologies, are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.

I've gone ahead and moved this to the correct category for you, Repositories. I recommend you check out this comment to help you out here!

[snowyu]

I appreciate having a workaround, I believe that having a built-in feature in the GitHub web interface to easily dismiss or clear notifications from repositories that no longer exist would provide a more seamless user experience. Relying on the API may not be ideal for all users, especially those who are not familiar with scripting or API usage.

Would it be possible to consider adding this functionality directly to the GitHub notifications UI, so users can clear notifications from deleted repositories without needing to resort to external tools or scripts? I think this improvement would benefit many users and make notification management more intuitive.

[DmitrySadovnikov]

Hi @snowyu,

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