#1391 - Email notifications are not happening for some of my forum users.

By Lhasadreams
Added 8th Sep 2013, 1:12 PM
6 views

Identifier	#1391
Issue type	Major issue (breaks an entire feature)
Title	Email notifications are not happening for some of my forum users.
Status	Closed (no changes needed)
Handling member	Chris Graham
Addon	General / Uncategorised
Description	I have been at a car show today and a number of users have reported that they are not getting email notifications. This got me thinking that all of these users have been involved in the thread that got moved from the section tied to the calendar comment entries to the national forum area. This was from the German and VAG show that was held yesterday and today. I am wondering if there is some corruption in the calculation of what needs to be sent for those users - some have reported some random notifications and others say that they are receiving none. Some of the users are cabrioanna, Dainish, Ginner, funk-star. I would appreciate it if you could take a look to see if something strange is occurring. Cheers Ade
Steps to reproduce
Funded?	No

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Unrated

Comments

By Guest posted 8th Sep 2013, 1:14 PM

This is the same as the issue you posted recently: comment topic notifications are not the same as forum topic notifications. Once a topic is moved to not be a comment topic, those notifications will effectively be neutered, but there won't necessarily be any forum topic notifications there for the same users.

By Guest posted 8th Sep 2013, 1:41 PM

No this is not the same issue.
But I wonder if is related.

Those people listed are telling me that notifications have stopped for other threads as well.
They are missing updates to threads they have posted on. The common factor is that they have all commented on the moved thread.

By Guest posted 8th Sep 2013, 1:53 PM

For example:
I just posted a test on this topic
http://vwgolfmk1.org.uk/forum/index.php?page=topicview&id=national_2%2Fmalvern-classic-car_7#post_1341113

Checking the Carbon Copy account, only one email was sent out to Fathammer.
Now I know Dainish has posted on this thread and so have I, but neither of us got a notification email or are using the Smart Topic notification.

:-(

By Guest posted 9th Sep 2013, 4:33 AM

Just checked again this morning and there are definitely notifications that are not being sent out.
The one for the above was never sent

By Guest posted 9th Sep 2013, 7:14 AM

This is getting weirder.
Dainish has just confirmed that she did get an email notification.
However there is no copy of it in our CC mailbox.
Two further users have posted and she did not get notifications for either of these and they are not in the CC mailbox.
My new reply to thread generated a single CC entry.

I have also noticed that one chap on the thread has a bouncing email address - is this the issue, ie does Composr stop prosessing the rest of the notifications if one bounces ?

This is a giving me a serious amount of grief from some members as they are missing out on valuable updates.

By Guest posted 9th Sep 2013, 7:59 AM

I will get back to you soon.

By Guest posted 9th Sep 2013, 8:54 AM

Okay, a few notes from my investigation so far...

The system is trying to be smart, it only CC's you in on one notification e-mail, to stop you being flooded. We will document this.

Bounces are outside the scope of the system. The system connects to the SMTP server, and at/after this point it knows nothing further about delivery.

7 people are CC'd into this topic.

The smart topic notification options runs at posting time. It automatically sets the monitoring to on when a user posts. It's not retroactive.

By Guest posted 9th Sep 2013, 8:57 AM

Whoops, I'm getting confused. I didn't mean smart topic notification does that, I meant the "Automatically monitor content you've touched" option does that.

Maybe it is an issue with smart notification. I am investigating.

By Guest posted 9th Sep 2013, 9:07 AM

18 people should in fact get notifications for this topic (taking into account forum notifications), even after the smart topic notification is taken into account. This is what the Composr API is telling me.

So if there is a problem, it seems to be at notification dispatch or email dispatch, rather than identifying who to contact.

By Guest posted 9th Sep 2013, 9:26 AM

I just posted in the topic.

According to the e-mail log (http://vwgolfmk1.org.uk/adminzone/?page=admin_emaillog), the following users have been e-mailed:
- Dexter1
- sphmk1
- Ginner
- ant5
- GHIA
- Dainish
- watson
- Eddiebear
- Fathammer
- Nige28
- Dano
- henshmk1
- tonya9boo
- ricky1985p
- knobcheese
- JettyJ

"Automatically monitor content you've touched" is not enabled for cabrioanna.
funk-star has not posted in the topic.
I posted as you, so you would not have received a notification.

Dainish and Ginner are in the list of who received them. They are both on gmail. Neither have smart topic notification. I wonder if gmail is flagging some as spam. Gmail also introduced inbox changes for bulk emailers recently, perhaps emails are going into here.

By Guest posted 9th Sep 2013, 2:51 PM

Hi Chris,
Whenever I post on the thread people get notifications.
It does not seem to matter whether I use Lhasadreams or Lhasatest they both work.
Danish has just confirmed that she got the notification.
I have just su as Ant5 and no notifications were sent out to me or Dainish.

I think that we are getting closer to the use case that causes the issue.

Cheers
Ade

By Guest posted 10th Sep 2013, 1:49 AM

Hi Chris,
More users reporting the same issue.
http://vwgolfmk1.org.uk/forum/index.php?page=topicview&id=website-comment-topics%2Fno-email-notifications&redirected=1#post_1341615
Cheers
Ade

By Guest posted 10th Sep 2013, 8:48 AM

I got two notifications for your last test post, one for lhasadreams and the other lhasatest
Cheers
Ade

By Guest posted 10th Sep 2013, 8:50 AM

Yes. Notification dispatch happens after script execution because it is an intensive process (relatively speaking). It is is put in a processing queue ("register_shutdown_function"). I think what is happening is something is breaking that queue mid-processing, depending on user permissions somehow. It sent this time because I enabled the mode that bypasses the queue for notifications.

By Guest posted 10th Sep 2013, 10:26 AM

Sorry about this, it was really quite complex.

It was not directly related to the post-execution queue. It's just that changed the execution order, hiding the bug.

The bug happened for any non-admin posting in a forum that is more than 1 level down in the forum tree.

We had an incorrect assumption in the permissions API. Basically it caused category permission checks to fail for users because it incorrectly thought loading all the permissions for one user meant it had loaded them for all users.

By Guest posted 10th Sep 2013, 11:18 AM

Ah so when I re-ordered the forums into sub forums recently that is what kicked off the bug.

So pleased that you have found and corrected it.

Thanks for the support Chris

Cheers
Ade