Troubleshooting

If you’re a developer who uses GitHub daily, you probably rely on notification badges to track issues, pull requests, and mentions. But what happens when the notification badge gets stuck — even after clearing everything? For months, I saw a 1 notification badge that refused to disappear, even though there aren’t any unread messages in any inbox folder. No archived items, no subscriptions, nothing hidden. Still, the badge remained. Many developers started reporting the same issue as early as September 2025. This wasn’t just a UI bug — it was caused by a spam attack impersonating Gitcoin, leaving backend notification records that GitHub never automatically cleaned up.

Today I encountered a problem: After installing nvm, the path for installing global packages changed, making it impossible to directly remove previously installed global packages using npm uninstall -g. How did I discover this? A long time ago, I installed a global package that could be executed directly from the terminal using a command. But because it was so long ago, when I tried to upgrade that package, I found it wasn’t listed in npm list -g.