On my Discourse instance where I am a site administrator, I wanted to keep track of what content was showing up in Activity Emails sent to users. I’m constantly active, so I would never get an Activity Summary email sent to my administrative user email address. I therefore created a separate discourse user, logged in and interacted as that user, and then intentionally stopped using that user, in order to see weekly Activity Summary mails sent to that email address.
These weekly emails worked for a long time, but on Feb 26, the last activity email was sent to this test user email address. That’s the last time it shows up in Sent Emails; there are no Skipped, Bounced, Received, or Rejected emails listed for that user. In the user profile, I have confirmed that the Activity Summary is selected, weekly. There is no bounce score for this user.
I can see that digest
mails are being sent to other users, so the general facility is working. (I also continue to get notices of things like at-mentions to my administrative user.) Therefore, it’s not a general problem with email delivery.
In the administrative view, I see that this user was last seen on 3 March 2020.
I upgraded to 2.7.0.beta4 on 18 February, and to 2.7.0.beta5 on 11 March. If this change had been caused by an upgrade, I would have expected to have received an email on 5 March.
This change happening 1 year after last seen feels suspicious, but I see no mention of a 1 year timeout in the Activity Summary guide:
Nor do I see in the code an obvious (to me) restriction on having activity in the past year:
My forum does have people who go silent for more than a year yet come back later; we have a core of regulars and lots of occasional visitors, and I’d like to make sure that other occasional visitors who haven’t been to the site for a while keep learning about new interesting content on the site. I’d sure appreciate hints for what else to look for.
Thanks!