Notifications show odd behavior after moving followers

[jessestu]

A user reported seeing odd notifications come through yesterday. It's the first notifications they've gotten about new followers, which they say is months after having processed a follower migration from a previous WordPress.com site.

What's odd to them is how the first notification mentions all of the followers that were imported, then the second notification mentions 7 more, even though the ones listed were still from the follower import. One of those was not, but that one no longer shows up in their follower list in My Site > People > Followers.

Here are the notifications:

Compared with the data in their Followers list (notice the various following dates):

Even though those follower dates list the last few days and the user claims the migration happened months ago, they remained adament that the followers listed were from the migration.

I'm not sure how to re-create this issue. I'm not sure to classify it as an issue, but the behavior does seem abnormal. I can't find documentation to address it. I'm curious to know what you all think.

• Followup: #1144442-zen
• Chat: #3413631-hc

[dmsnell]

Not sure exactly what's happening here but we are looking at notifications for both the old site and the new site. The new site has about four times as many followers as the old one. We don't clear out notifications in any way when someone imports a clone of their site elsewhere. I think things are confusing since the site titles are identical.

Even though those follower dates list the last few days and the user claims the migration happened months ago, they remained adament that the followers listed were from the migration.

There's no need to wipe clean the follow date when migrating followers. I'd need to find someone to confirm this but I think we transfer them over entirely, history included.

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Finally follow notifications can include the additional complexity that followers without gravatars aren't shown. The purpose is to show actual people and we don't want a list of default avatars to flush them out. 😄