Not sending posting notifications?

DanDevine

With the help of RJ and the community I got the forum upgraded. Everything seems fine except it doesn't seem to send notifications of posts. I can message to a user, I can test the email setting and it passes and sends an email to me when testing, I am not getting notifications sent to me when I post. I went from 2.1 to 3.3 so I am not sure if there is some new switch in settings or add-on I am missing to get notifications to all users?

TIA

Dan

R_J

The first thing you should do is to check if you have set the preferences correctly. Visit /profile/preferences in your forum and see if you have opted in to get a notification by mail.

If you receive some mails but not all and you should receive more mails, could it be that some spam filter is filtering them out?

DanDevine

Thanks RJ.

It appears that the notification prefs for the categories and discussions are all unchecked for some users! I used the signed in with the credentials of a friend of mine and noticed this. As soon as I turned them on he got the posting notifications. I used a add-on back in 2.3 that turned all of this notifications on when a user registered. Maybe that is why they are all unchecked. Now the problem is how to tell the existing users to turn them on since they don't get my posts! Have to figure that out but they are going out now. It is working.

Dan

DanDevine

Ok,

Our main club database is small. Less that 30 so I spoofed them and turned on the notifications in the categories that are private to our club group catagories. That solved that problem. I have about 50 other general members who would need to be notified that the forum is back online. What are the hazards of allowing advanced notifications for those members who are not allowed to view the club member area but may be interested in participating in the other categories? I really don't look forward to editing each one of them to checkbox at least one of the categories. Is there an add on to do this? Maybe I don't understand something but what do other admins do? Do they allow advanced notifications or not for all the users?

R_J

I would advice against that approach altogether. Your users should be the only ones who change their preferences. In Germany, you could get into legal trouble if your forum sends me mails that I haven't asked for - or even worse: that I have decided against before.

That said, you can set default preferences which would apply to those that never changed their notification preferences. It has been discussed recently: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/260481/#Comment_260481

In order to inform your users, you can get their mail addresses from the database by running the following sql:

SELECT Name, Email
FROM GDN_User
WHERE Banned = 0
AND Deleted = 0

With those mail addresses, you can send out a newsletter-ish mail to all of them (send the mail to yourself and put all recipients in BCC!) informing them about the relaunch of your forum.

DanDevine

Thanks RJ,

Will check out the forum links.

Dan