So no related additional activity in the access logs?

Maybe it's a cron job (maybe a bit of a weird time, maybe the server has a different timezone). It looks like some kind of spam login detection.

But from just the query alone it's very hard to tell (also because it's a Elgg <= 2.3 query).

But imagine a case scenario where I am creating an entity for internal need only - this entity is never exposed to the end user - (no user will be able to edit / delete / view / comment / like on this entity). In such case what's the use of subscribing the user to this entity?

Good point.

I like your suggestion of a capability.

For now you can always listen to the 'create', 'relationship' hook. You can than check if it's a notification relationship with your entity and return false.

Feature request https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg/issues/14301

Thanks for considering the feature request, and the clue Jerome :) 

Seems, you can only do it using custom CSS styles

I managed to achieve this by passing

Then I copied elgg/views/default/page/components/table.php to mod/myplugin/views/default/page/components/my-custom-list-type and added my conditions in that file.

In this case, your initial code should work as is.

Try use:

'item_class' => "elgg-item $class_name_based_on_metadata",

There's no such plugin.

There're only custom and paid solutions.