UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic UBB.classic 6 Support Sporadic email notifications

Hello - currently using UBB Classic 6.7.2. When a member posts an issue, moderators are notified via email. When the moderators respond, they receive an email notification, but the member who posted the original issue does NOT receive an email. When posting, I've double-checked that the member has checked the email notification box (it is configured to be checked by default).

Is there a limit on the number of recipients?

Members have been manually checking the status of their requests, when they remember. Otherwise, moderators manually email the topic to the member, when THEY remember.

Thanks.

Do other email functions work normally for the users not receiving notifications, such as password retrieval?

Yes.

Thanks.

That's kind of odd. There's only one email function, and mails can't get only sent "somtimes."

There is no limit on the number of people that can be mailed notification of replies.

Does it matter which email domain the mails are being sent to? For example, if all the moderators have local email addresses, while the users tend not to?

It's an internal forum--all email addresses have the same domain.

We think it's odd too. If mail isn't relaying, no one would get an email--not just the poster. Oh well.

Well, that's even more confusing... and also makes troubleshooting much harder, as the next step would have been to open a support ticket so I can inject some troubleshooting code and try it out for myself. It's hard to do that for internal boards. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

We have this same exact problem.

It's gotten worse as time went by. I thought it might have been our old NT 4.0 server, and yesterday we completed migration from old server to new server (forums were the last thing to move.) I was hoping this would solve the issue, but it has not.

We have numerous things that send mail from this server using Net::SMTP module that never have a problem, other mail functions on the board never have a problem (password request, moderator notification, etc.), it's just reply notification and it's sporadic.

Tim

Oh yeah, we're using 6.7.2 also. It was running on IIS on NT 4.0. It is now running with the latest everything (IIS/Perl/PHP) on Windows Server 2003.

There is no way that mail can not be sent. If anything was to interrupt the mail process, or stop before sending mails, there would be an error message presented to the user. The error possibly could appear below the rest of the page contents. Ask your users to keep an eye out for overly long transition pages ("Thank you for posting...").

Well, I tried some changes on this as far as eliminating any possibility it was environmental. I installed a local SMTP server instance and directed the board to connect to that server which then relays to our outbound SMTP server. The thought was if it was related to any delay/network type thing, that would be eliminated. This also serves as a "queue" of sort in case there were actual network/SMTP issues since there isn't anything but the one-shot attempt in UBB itself.

For a while I'd not had a report of this under this new configuration. I'd thought that maybe it was resolved... until Monday. A user reported that he didn't get one notification out of several threads he was monitoring (all the others generated responses upon reply.) He then had the same thing occur again the next day for a reply on the same thread. He told me he verified the Email Notification box was checked (and I believe him as he is a *very* thorough user.)

Who knows what's going on. It's just interesting that it followed the board being migrated from server to server, and it reduced in frequency with the local SMTP addition.

We use this as a support mechanism for customers. They come and report issues under a variety of forums. While the managers of the products are generally moderators and always receive notifications, the customers, and sometimes internal people reporting and watching things for customers, may miss a notification which leads to some confusion.

While it's easy to ask our internal staff to constantly monitor the board for possible replies that were not notified on, I would never imagine telling our customers to do the same.

Perhaps it isn't a mail issue, but an issue of a value not set somewhere for a reply? Does a quick-reply always have Email Notification turned on? It just seems like there is something that is a result of the planets being aligned just right to cause this as it's not 100%, it's really hit or miss and only applicable to post notification (never any other board emails like moderator notification, password requests, etc.) It's almost like some bit somewhere doesn't get flipped at the right point.

Anyway, I appreciate your consideration with this. We've been a long time user of UBB and have a lot built upon it. I'd just discovered though that we don't have the latest version (we have 6.7.2) and our support had expired last October. I've wen't ahead and and renewed our annual support and will download/install the 6.7.3 and report back as to if this is still ocurring (although it could take a couple days before someone complains about it again.)

Thanks,
Tim

FWIW... I never received a notification to the most recent reply on this thread from 3-02.

Quickreply never signs up a user for email notification, and the checkbox on the full reply form is never checked by default. However, once a user has subscribed to a topic through a previous reply, there's no need to subscribe again. (Users can also edit their posts after initial posting to add the subscription flag.)

If you're still using the local SMTP relay, try and turn on any logging options it has. See if you can correlate entries in the logs with replies that users aren't getting notifications for.

You as the admin can also edit the first post in each topic to view the list of subscribed users - it'll be below the Options box on the edit form.