Unable to read unreadable message

I came across some weird messages. Here's one:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/73087

I haven't read it, so it is marked as unread by me in the group Book Talk., i.e. https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/593/Book-talk

If I open the 73087 message it appears as: "This message has been deleted by its author."
If I click more and Mark as read to here it appears to be read (the vertical bar to the right of 1. Hokhiko disappears). But a reload of the page shows it to be unread.

So how do I read an unreadable message or at least mark it as having been seen albeit not read?

I came across this message and other ghost messages like it because I recently started watching the Book-talk group and started reading some of the (very many) older posts .

Hmmm, testing this further. I think it may be some sort of combination of dormant threads + a single post existing in the entire thread, which has been deleted.

Testing my theory above, this is happening but not always. I'm not sure if it's the date of the thread or what.

Dormant threads w/single (deleted) posts that are NOT marked as read when loaded/reloaded*
Sep 13 2009 https://www.librarything.com/topic/73087
Mar 9 2010 https://www.librarything.com/topic/86698

Dormant threads w/single (deleted) posts that DO show up as read when loaded
Jun 8 2007 https://www.librarything.com/topic/14200
Oct 3 2006 https://www.librarything.com/topic/2488

*For the threads that won't show up as read, you can click the "Mark as read to here" on the post, and the dark blue bar next to the post number disappears, but the blue background of the post header doesn't turn to gray.

If I go to the far end of unread thread in Book-talk, i.e something like this:

https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/593/Book-talk?offset=9000

I see a lot of these with the Last Date column saying "susiesharp, no date"
but when I click on it (i.e. https://www.librarything.com/topic/88320) it says Apr 3, 2010 and susiesharp, so in the list view I get "no date" but inside the thread it says "Apr 3, 2010". Maybe there are two date fields involved?

>2 kristilabrie: * "the blue background of the post header doesn't turn to gray."
I think it does turn to gray, but it changes back to blue rather quickly.

All of the examples seem to be Dormant, Deleted by Author and Single Message Threads.

>3 bnielsen: Yeah, because of the state of this issue (only showing up on dormant, deleted by author or single message threads) this isn't going to be high priority to fix, but the developers are aware of the issue. You might be able to work around the issue, if you must have these threads showing up as "read", by posting on the thread to bring it out of dormancy and then marking as read... sorry for the trouble.

>4 kristilabrie: Yes, I considered that as a possible work around, but I think I'll just ignore them for the moment. I can easily forget about errors once I've reported or at least described them. :-)

I also considered making the headline of the bug report more snappy, but failed. (Something along with "Head Dead Head Dead" :-)

>5 bnielsen: Hah! I appreciate your good humor, at least. Thanks for your patience.

>4 kristilabrie: slight correction: I think "(only showing up on dormant, deleted by author or single message threads)" should be "(only showing up on dormant, deleted by author and single message threads)" i.e. we need all three conditions. I think I can add a fourth too: 'showing up with "no date" in the "Last date" listing'.

I imagine that you could find all of the "no date" entries and set them to something reasonable like "August, 2007" and make the problem go away. But maybe you (i.e. the developer(s?)) should take a look to see if something more is amiss.

People are (rightfully) annoyed when I use the suggested work-around.
See the discussion here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/85030

I can see 373 threads displaying the bug, but I can hide them using the Ignored feature, I think. So that's probably what I'll do.

>8 bnielsen: I found a fix for this on the post page itself that should work, but I'm wondering if you're also seeing those posts as unread on the list page (e.g., https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/593/Book-talk)?

I am going to mark this as fixed. At least now marking a post with no text as read keeps the status on refresh. Since I don't know about the list display, I will just wait to see if someone can provide another example.