If you send an invite to someone, it will cause the “Notices” menu to display the unread message counter. I would recommend the default policy be that notices which are created in response to your actions be excluded from that by default either by marking them as read by default or changing https://github.com/LibraryOfCongress/viewshare/blob/04f4f0c8294bff0ae62ec1baeca3555334e074d5/viewshare/apps/vendor/notification/context_processors.py#L7 to exclude notices where the sender is the current user (i.e. Notice.objects.exclude(sender=request.user)…)