Thread

I setup my site to function with provider’s smtp (the provider doesn’t support php or sendmail). The e-mail features are all working fine except for the comments notification. So while the site properly sends an authentication e-mail to new users and allows users to e-mail each other through the userlist, it doesn’t e-mail notification to people whose comments have been responded to (this is the case for unique users, I know that it won’t notify me if I respond to my own comment).

Is there any way to get a debugg mode going the way you can do in the communications tab to see what’s wrong? Any ideas?

Odd- it just flat never sends comment notifications?  I don’t think it’s going to be an email setting- since it’s working in other areas.  What build/version are you running?

Want to do a little debugging?  If you can link me to a test case, I’ll post a reply, get you to reply- see what happens with notifications.  To be clear- it just flat never notifies anybody about comment notifications?

Nope, it doesn’t send an e-mail to the commentor when someone comments after his comment (even though the send notification button is checked). The build is 20070512 . I am using code from a theme on your site, so the problem definitely isn’t how I programmed the site.

Try posting a comment on

http://www.thedailyslant.com/index.php/site/comments/brits_vote_to_kill_free_debate_degrade_academia/

and I’ll reply. You don’t need to register to post a comment, but you do need to leave an e-mail.. I don’t know if registering will help us understand the problem better. Whatever you think is best.

Cool- I commented on the article linked above.  Going to skim through the rendered code- see if I spot any hints.  (Didn’t register- shouldn’t matter as I gave a good email address.  Now- if it worked logged in but not logged out- that would tell us something.  But if it’s just generally not working, I don’t know that it matters at this point.)

Posted a reply. It doesn’t seem to work for registered users or unregistered visitors. Let me know if you find something.

Huh- ok, I got the notification:

Someone just responded to the entry you subscribed to at:
The Daily Slant

The title of the entry is:
Brits Vote to Kill Free Debate, Degrade Academia

You can see the comment at the following URL:
http://www.thedailyslant.com/index.php/site/comments/brits_vote_to_kill_free_debate_degrade_academia/

Thanks.

To stop receiving notifications for this comment, click here:
http://www.thedailyslant.com/index.php?ACT=2&id=32

So- that’s kind of good.  Harder to debug though.  Is it possible that it’s a matter of smart notification?  If enabled- and I believe it is by default- it will only send one notification until you visit again- no point in filling up your inbox with 10 redundant notifications.  That might be an issue.  Might be a spam filter getting triggered in some cases.  But the email itself looks dead perfect- nothing odd in the headers, plain text, priority 3.

We could go through the database, look for oddities like folks not having notification set to ‘yes’- but it works to set it to yes, so….

How sure are you that nobody is getting notifications?  If it’s coming to me ok, it’s about got to be going to some folks.  If we could find a pattern in when it works, when it doesn’t- we’d know how to fix it.

So after doing a whole bunch of tests with a bunch of registered names, here’s what seems to be the problem:

- Registered users get notification when their comments are replied to
- Unregistered users who leave their e-mail get notification
- I (my Superadmin account) does not get notifications, even if I leave a comment on the article and someone comments under that comment.
- On the other hand, if I post a comment as an unregistered user and leave the same e-mail that I use for my superadmin account, and then someone else posts a comment, I get notification (as an unregistered user)

So basically, my superadmin acct never gets notifications. What could the reason for that be?

I’d double check that you’ve got comment notification ‘on’ for the comment- and then I’d try turning smart notification off in your prefs- just to test if that makes a difference.  And as a quick way to see your notification pref for all comments- you can go to utilities, SQL Manager- and in the query form, try:

SELECT * FROM exp_comments WHERE author_id= x

Where ‘x’ is your member id- as a superadmin.  Notification pref should be y in order to get notifications.  Hm- and maybe double check your email address- make sure it’s going where you think it’s going.

And there are other ways to set it up so you’ll be notified of all comments- you can do that.  But we should figure out why you aren’t getting them the regular way.

The notification is set to y. Also my prefs are setup to notify the article author of trackbacks and comments, but I get no notification when people post comments. Does that imply anything in particular?

It’s- weird.  Try sending yourself an email from the communicate tab- same address as the one being used for notifications.  Does it go through?

Yep, sends successfully, I get it in my mailbox. We have 3 columnists on the site, and none of us get notifications when our articles are commented on.

Let’s see- you’re on 20070512- I’d suggest an upgrade before we dig much further so that we’re all using the same code base.  That said- I’m not recalling any issues with this one. 

Triple check the ‘Notification Prefs’ for each individual weblog- be sure the radio is clicked to enable notification.  And can you copy/paste the list of emails as you’re using it.  (Might want to alter the actual addies to avoid spam.)