So closing as cannot reproduce since the error doesn't happen anymore in XWiki 16.10.15, and we now have a consistent behaviour, which is to never display targeted event (and mention notification are targeted event) when the notifications macro is called with `useUserPreferences="false"`. So we can't reproduce because the notification is just never displayed.
Note that in 12.10.5 it was already the case in the main wiki: the issue could only be reproduced in subwiki where the notification used to wrongly appear.
Apparently it stopped to appear in XWiki 13.10.3 in subwiki, I'm not 100% sure what fixes it, I think it's probably related with XWIKI-19400 but maybe this ticket prevented getting the event and we later on fixed that.
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