SPO 2013 - Community Site category tiles showing incorrect amount of topics/replies

Question

We are using O365/Sharepoint Online 2013.

We have a community site in our intranet and we have added 9 categories there. The topic and reply counts that are showing in the "What's Happening" -web part and the category tiles in the category page are showing incorrect amounts. There are some discussions that were deleted and the counts didn't reset the 0 even after making a new discussion after the deletion of the old ones.

With Sharepoint Designer I can manually modify the topic/reply counts that are showing in the "What's Happening" -web part but the tiles are a whole different story. And still shouldn't the community site topic/reply counts work automatically?

What has been tried without luck:

• Waited 24 hours to see if it takes time to update the counts
• Posted new discussion(s) after deleting old ones to update the counts
• Modified the topic/reply counts manually in Sharepoint Designer (What's Happening -web part did start showing the correct counts but the tiles remained with the incorrect counts)

I'm eternally grateful for anyone who comes up with a solution/fix for this! :-)

Answer 1

As a result of quite extensive troubleshooting with the assistance of Microsoft's customer support the problem has been solved.

It seems to be a "bug" or a design flaw in the SharePoint Online itself. If a discussion with replies is deleted without removing the replies first, the counters will not react. So if all the replies are first removed and then the discussion is deleted, the counters will react to it.

I hope this will help someone with the same question/problem! :-)

Answer 2

The workaround is to temporarily change the category of the discussion. This triggers some kind of job that corrects the counts. I am likely going to write a utility that goes through the list and does this automatically at the click of a button.