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Comment by diath | Hacker News Reader

I had that happen when somebody tagged me in a private repository that was later deleted (?).

You can fix it through the API by generating an API token in your settings with notifications permission on and using this (warning: it will mark all your notifications as read up to the last_read_at day):

    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":"2025-10-09T00:00:00Z","read":true}'

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An other trick is to go into the "done" tab, and move at least 25 issues back to unread.

Then you can click the checkbox at the top and then "select all", and it'll mark the phantom notifications as read.

Oooooh. Snap! Thank you. This was driving me crazy.

Yes private repos that are deleted leave notifications behind.

GitHub has been experiencing mass waves of crypto scam bots opening repos and mass tagging tens of thousands of users on new issues. Using the issue content body to generate massive scam marketing like content bodies.

I got hit with one of these, then commented on GitHub meetsn issue about it, and ironically got a hundred notifications for everybody's comments, many complaining about phantom notifications.

Yep, there was a huge spate of spam with hundreds of people pinged, and when they got reported / deleted the notifications didn't go...

I have been getting added to spam repos and orgs several times a day for weeks. it's annoying

Interesting that they went with a custom MIME type and a custom version header. I would have expected the version to be in the MIME type, but I feel like there is a reason behind this.

Thanks for this! I had been meaning to mark a phantom notification as read — and this snippet came in handy.

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