Thanks for the feedback @7thcircle . We understand your point here.
The red notification badge is currently tied to admin notices/updates shown by the plugin, which is why it may reappear after updates. While this type of notification behavior is fairly common across many WordPress plugins, we do understand that for some users and agencies it can feel unnecessary or distracting.
We’ll discuss again this internally again and review whether we can further improve or reduce this behavior in future updates.
Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts.
If the notice was of value it would be one thing, but the notices are for a survey which is far from important. The other notice is to tell us that we updated the plugin, which we already know since most users of your plugins do not use auto updates so we would have manually updated. Having to clear this requires 3 clicks per site and for some of us that can be hundreds of clicks for a survey.
@7thcircle Thanks for following up here, and apologies for the earlier reply pointing to this as expected behavior.
After checking internally, this is actually a bug. The activity badge was intentionally removed in a previous release in 2025 because we agreed it shouldn’t be appearing for things like update notices or surveys. What happened is that the code handling its removal got broken at some point, which brought the badge back unintentionally and also affected some related CSS in the body tag.
The fix is already on the way, and going forward the badge will not be shown for these kinds of notices.
Appreciate you taking the time to flag this and pushing back. It is exactly the kind of feedback that helps us catch regressions like this one.
Hello again @7thcircle !
We have just released an update 5.6.4 which also contains a fix for this; you should no longer see the red dot badge anymore. Thank you for your understanding and also for flagging this!
Should you have any other questions, feel free to reach out! 🙂
