If you create a user with lots of unread messages (thousands of them) and then view the conversation in the message area it waits for the "mark all as read" request to complete before it renders the messages in the widget even though we've received the messages from the server.

This results in the loading spinner sitting there for ages even though we've got content to render.

Each request is separate from one another and asynchronous so the message rendering shouldn't be blocked by the "mark all as read" ajax request.