What does highlighting mean on the profile's "Favorites" tab?

Question

The "Favorites" tab in the user profile highlights some questions, but I am not clear when questions are highlighted.

I thought the highlighted questions were the ones that have been recently changed, but the tab shows that two questions have been changed. I also thought they could be questions using my favorite tags, but that's not the case either. (I would not understand in which way my favorite questions are associated with my favorite tags, though.)

What does highlighting mean on the profile's "Favorites" tab?

Update: What I see my favorites tab is now the following:

As you see, the questions where not changed by me.

Answer 1

Update:

The number next to the tab indicates how many posts have new answers since you last visited the tab.

Here's how I confirmed: I favorited this question when it was asked. Popular Demand's and Kiamlaluno's edits did not add a number next to the tab (see comments below). However, Chris' new answer earlier today increased the count, which confirms this. Here's a screenshot:

Although the activity shows Kiamlaluno's edit, the counter increase is due to Chris' answer.

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Previous answer

The highlighting means that the particular question has been changed since you last visited that tab. However, the number next to the tab only counts those questions that have not been modified by you (as the last editor).

In your case, the first question was last edited by you. The algorithm probably assumes that you know that you edited your favorites. It makes sense too... you don't want the bulb to light up for a typo that you fixed. However, when you visit that tab, it shows all questions that have been modified.

Here are the steps you can take to reproduce this and confirm my theory:

• Visit the 'favorites' tab to clear all highlighting.
• Close the tab and go to a favorited question and edit it.
• Now visit your user page. You will not see a [1] next to the tab.
• If you visit the tab, the question you edited should be highlighted.

Answer 2

I just ran into this issue myself.

The three links in the image are as follows.

• 14h ago Kyle Cronin 20.9k
• 20h ago Popular Demand 21.8k
• 21h ago Jeremy Banks 3,536

There have been a few theories about how this works.

1. According to yoda,

   the number next to the tab only counts those questions that have not been modified by you (as the last editor)

   Unfortunately, this clearly does not match the behavior I am seeing—I was not the last editor on any of the highlighted questions.

2. Popular Demand suggested that perhaps

   The number next to the word 'favorites' indicates the number of posts you've favorited since the last time you checked the tab, not the number of changes that have been made to favorited posts.

   This doesn't appear to be correct, either: I marked this question as a favorite, and it did not affect the number displayed on the favorites tab.

3. Yoda also speculated that

   the number on the tab indicates the new answers to your favorites since the last time you checked. Not the number of changes as I mentioned or the number of posts as Popular mentioned.

   This, too, does not seem to be accurate. Note that all of the highlighted activity was caused by edits, not new answers.

My only guess is that this is a strange caching issue and, if it is, should be filed as a bug.