Cannot clear notification from "gitcoin-dev/gitcoin.com"

[blacksmithop]

Select Topic Area

Bug

Body

The user, repo behind the spam seems to be deleted, however the resulting notification cannot be cleared or marked as read

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[visortelle]

Same here:

[thoroc]

It should be cleared now. Both issue created by the bot and the repo are gone.

[visortelle]

It's still here in my case.

[jurgenhaas]

I'm having the same issue with a notification from https://github.com/notifications?query=repo%3Agitcoindaofundpromo%2FGitCoinDevelopersPromo, can you clear that too, please?

[KSXGitHub]

Mine is notify-hub-co/gitcoin.com.

It's very annoying.

[KSXGitHub]

I'm trying https://gist.github.com/jeremystretch/2c09f76837fc5af787fe9ff7747ecf3f

[KSXGitHub]

And it's done.

Note

Don't use "fine grained token", it's useless.

[ardaguclu]

I couldn't find any way to remove this notification. This is incredibly bad experience.

[KSXGitHub]

I use API to workaround this: https://gist.github.com/jeremystretch/2c09f76837fc5af787fe9ff7747ecf3f

[ardaguclu]

Thank you

[ardaguclu]

Manual deletion via API worked for me.

Get notification ID;

$ gh api notifications

Get token;

$ TOKEN=$(gh auth token)

DELETE notification

$ curl -L   -X DELETE   -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json"   -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN "   -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28"   https://api.github.com/notifications/threads/$ID

[peterldowns]

@ardaguclu thank you! A slightly easier delete command:

# get notifications, look for the ID of the spam notification
gh api notifications
# mark that spam notification as read
gh api -X DELETE notifications/threads/$NOTIFICATION_ID

[pitasi]

This also worked for me to get rid of unread blue dot and notification count with a single command:

gh api notifications -X PUT -f last_read_at=2025-09-24T00:00:00Z -f read=true

[flip1995]

Note that gh api notifications will only show you unread notifications. If you also want to find read notifications, you can use

gh api "notifications?all=true&participating=true"

Maybe there are even better filters. But that was good enough for me to find the ID of the read notification I wanted to delete.

[Nezteb]

Here's a somewhat-nuclear option to delete all unread notifications:

gh api notifications | jq -r '.[] | select(.unread == true) | .id' | xargs -I {} gh api -X DELETE "notifications/threads/{}"

(assuming you have jq installed)

[qodeninja]

omg that worked thank you!

[jurgenhaas]

Unfortunately, this doesn't help.

1. There is no button "Marek all as read".
2. On mobile, the notification doesn't show up either, so it can't be marked as read.
3. I doubt this is happening, my stuck notification is now a week old and still bothering me.
4. Contacting GitHub support is what brought me here, so it feels like now I'm running in circles.

While this may not affect my account, it affects my attention that I have to spend on alerts. Having a permanent false positive is extremely terrible. And I can't just ignore GitHub notifications in general, as that would lead to delayed responses on important ones.

[NotAFile]

LLM generated nonsense comment, thanks for nothing.

[rushter]

Stop spamming this ChatGPT nonsense in every thread. You are wasting people's time.

[blacksmithop]

@KSXGitHub your solution worked!

For anyone wanting to use this:

1. Create classic token

2. Allow permission for Notifications

3. Grab the token

4. Make API request with last_read_at as null (deleted content seems to have it as null)

curl -L \
  -X PUT \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  https://api.github.com/notifications \
  -d '{"last_read_at": null,"read":true}'

[hatrd]

it worked

[shramee]

Simple clear for notifications if you have gh set up,

curl -L \
  -X PUT \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gh auth token)" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  https://api.github.com/notifications \
  -d '{"last_read_at": null,"read":true}'

[pitasi]

you can also

gh api notifications -X PUT -f last_read_at=null -f read=true

[shramee]

Didn't work and returned this error,

gh: Time values must be in ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ (HTTP 422)
{
  "message": "Time values must be in ISO 8601 format: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ",
  "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/rest/activity/notifications#mark-notifications-as-read",
  "status": "422"
}

Did that work for you?

[pitasi]

actually you're right, I used the current timestamp instead of null and it worked for me

[TallTed]

Simple clear for notifications if you have gh set up,

How about if you don't have gh set up, and don't know how, nor whether you'd want it for any other purpose? (My primary coding language is English, and I do all my gh-related work in my web browser.)

[zallanx]

Also having this issue. Is there a way to prevent unknown repos from adding you and then @ you in their comments?

[dougg0k]

It should not be marked as answered, it should be resolved by github.

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/174246#discussioncomment-14480778

GH_PAGER="" gh api -X DELETE notifications/threads/(GH_PAGER="" gh api notifications --jq '.[] | select(.repository.name | test("gitcoin")) | .id')

[blacksmithop]

@dougg0k this has happened before
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/6874

From what I read online the notifications seem to get cleared in some routine process sometime down the line.

[vinkla]

I'm seeing this as well. There is no way to clear the notifications.

[bamjun]

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/174283#discussioncomment-14527039

you can use this

uvx fown auth login

uvx fown noti delete -r

[chrisguidry]

This is affecting me as well:

repo:gitcoin-announcement/gitcoin
repo:notify-hub/gitcoin
repo:gitcoin-mail-notification/gitcoin.com

[AndnixSH]

I'm getting same issue

[danchev]

This will clear out all notification threads, including those stuck in the Repositories section.

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script
#
# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.12"
# dependencies = ["requests"]
# ///
import os
import requests

TOKEN = os.environ.get("GITHUB_TOKEN")

headers = {
    'Accept': 'application/vnd.github+json',
    'Authorization': f'Bearer {TOKEN}',
    'X-Github-Api-Version': '2022-11-28',
}

notifications = requests.get('https://api.github.com/notifications?all=true&participating=true&since=2025-09-20T00:00:00Z', headers=headers)

for notification in notifications.json():
    print(f"{notification['id']}: {notification['subject']['title']}")
    requests.delete(f'https://api.github.com/notifications/threads/{notification["id"]}', headers=headers)

[tayloramurphy]

Unfortunately this and many of the other suggestions don't work for me. The repo in question does not appear in the notifications response. I'm hoping github has a process to clear this out at some point, but it's super annoying. I was able to get the paradigm one removed, but not the gitcoin.

[ghiscoding]

see below...

[bamjun]

is there a way to clear this notification via actions? (nodejs?)

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/174283#discussioncomment-14527039

you can use this

uvx fown auth login

uvx fown noti delete -r

[ghiscoding]

Similar to above but using a GitHub Action Workflow, create a GitHub Token (via GitHub -> Developer Settings -> Token Classic -> Notifications (read/write)), then go under any of your project, add GH_TOKEN into your "Settings -> Secrets and Variables", then add a GitHub Workflow (under .github/workflows) and run it manually... and finally, it's all cleared!!!

name: Clear notifications (bash)

on:
  workflow_dispatch:   # run manually from the Actions UI

jobs:
  clear:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Mark all notifications as read
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}
        run: |
          curl -X PUT \
            -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
            -H "Authorization: Bearer $GH_TOKEN" \
            https://api.github.com/notifications

[bamjun]

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/174283#discussioncomment-14527039

you can use this

uvx fown auth login

uvx fown noti delete -r

[shuffle2]

can't believe this is known for over a year and there's no fix from github....can it be raised as a bug they should fix somehow?
(using python requests to delete worked, thanks...)

[dessalines]

Re-open this issue, it is not fixed! I'm not creating a token just to fix githubs bug.

[Abdeali099]

Have you tried this https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/174310#discussioncomment-14524662?

[dessalines]

Again, I'm not installing github command line, or creating a special token just to fix github's bug!

[betseg]

no way to fix this without installing github's CLI?

[soakes]

There are many ways to clear the notification without installing GH CLI and they have been mentioned in this thread. Without installing GH CLI or setting up a GHA job, easiest is probably..

 ❯ export GH_TOKEN=ghp_XXXXXXX
 ❯ curl -X PUT -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" -H "Authorization: Bearer $GH_TOKEN" https://api.github.com/notifications

You will need to create a GH Token, there's no way around that afaik.

[hetdabhi]

Hey @blacksmithop, I recently ran into the same issue — leftover notification from a deleted repo 🤖

Here’s another way to manually remove the stuck notification using the GitHub CLI:

# List all notifications and locate the thread ID
gh api /notifications

# Once you have the thread ID, run this to remove it
gh api --method DELETE /notifications/threads/THREAD_ID

🔍 You might need to scroll through the list if you have a lot of notifications, but once you get the correct THREAD_ID, this will clear it out.

Worked like a charm for me when the “Mark as read” option didn’t work. 🧹

If this helped, feel free to check out my GitHub: hetdabhi and drop a follow for more useful tips 💙
Happy to support the community!

[suxiaogang223]

It works!!!

[hetdabhi]

It’s working as expected.

[zhangysh1995]

Amazing, thank you!

[codecat]

This issue is definitely not "answered" - Github needs to fix this themselves, I shouldn't need to use the API manually to fix this.

[RossComputerGuy]

True, I had to use the API to fix this. I hate unread notifications. GH should recognize having 1 out of 0 notifications read shouldn't be possible, division by 0 exception 😆.

[tayloramurphy]

Agreed that it's not answered. I still have the repo in the sidebar and nothing in notifications!

[denizzzka]

I hope next time the spammers will write something more meaningful. Such adv will work and it will make sense for the Github to remove this spam notifications rather than leave it as is.

[iXavierLiu]

ME TOO paradigm-notify/paradigm

[rickyma]

Very annoying. Please fix this instead of letting us calling the DELETE API manually.

[al6x]

UP, fix that shit!

[jurgenhaas]

I guess this won't be fixed any time soon. GH is forced to move to azure, and that's their no. 1 priority for the next 12 months, according to their CTO.

On azure, it can only get better /sarcasm

[trlef19]

Found an easier solution. Android users, download diohub from play store, login, go to notifications, tap on the stuck notification. That's it. It will now be cleared!

[neclimdul]

Did this get fixed? I suddenly don't have any unread notifications.

[tayloramurphy]

I think it did! I wonder if some once a quarter cleanup job ran to clear out the cache 😂

[helen]

Close, we found the sneaky problem and the new cleanup job finished running :) https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-04-notifications-triggered-by-spam-accounts-are-now-correctly-hidden/

[tayloramurphy]

Love it! Thanks for closing the loop.