Again on "Empty emails and notifications generated on topic assignment"

Hello,

I’m a moderator on a forum based on Discourse. We are experiencing a problem that has already been described here: Empty emails and notifications generated on topic assignment

Whenever a topic is assigned to a moderator, two emails are sent. The first email is sent to the moderator that has received the assignment (no problem with that). The second email is sent to all the moderators (including the assignee) and it is empty. This is the screenshot of the empty email that is sent:

We would like that these empty emails were not sent. From what I understood reading “Empty emails and notifications generated on topic assignment”, this should be the proper standard behavior, but not what we experience.

Are we missing some setting somewhere or is this due to a bug?

We are running the latest Discourse version v2.6.0.beta2. The person responsible for the deployment of Discourse, @trobiyo, can provide you with further details.

Thanks

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Today I tried to replicate the issue mentioned by you. I have a theory about what is happening but I would like to confirm it with you.

Basically, in the mentioned topic there are 3 plugins involved:

  • discourse-assign
  • discourse-solved
  • discourse-math

I noticed that when a post is marked as a solution everybody watching category to which topic belongs to is notified.

Normally, the content of the post is included in the email however because you have MathJax equation in your post maybe it couldn’t render that correctly in the email - I couldn’t replicate it

I would like to ask you for 3 things:

  1. Could you confirm if moderators are “watching” “Scoring and Biasing” category?
  2. Could you show me your math plugin settings?
  3. Could you click edit on this post and give me raw markdown so I can completely replicate your scenario?
3 Likes

Hi @kris.kotlarek,

Thank you for your reply.


  1. This is an interesting question. Indeed, I know that moderators receive notifications for any post in any category, I guess this is due to “settings - user preferences”:

    I’m also attaching here the snapshot of the “category default notifications” for the moderators group, where I understand that no category is being watched:

  1. Here is a snapshot of the math plugin settings:

  1. Here is the the raw markdown you asked for:

    Dear Isabela,
    
    In FLUKA **DOSE-EQ** scoring by default means scoring *Ambient Dose Equivalent* [$H^{*}(10)$], but it is possible to score *Effective dose* as well.
    
    See: https://flukafiles.web.cern.ch/flukafiles/manual/AUXSCORE.html
    
    Cheers,
    David 
    

I’d add that I am not convinced that the “discourse-math” plugin has something to do with the problem. First, the empty notification email was sent before the solution with the mathematical expression was posted. Second, because we experience the same issue also for post where there are not mathematical expression, like post 1 and post 2.

3 Likes

Thank you for all information. I still couldn’t replicate it in my config.

I was thinking it is related to discourse-solved but as you said, it is also happening for “classic” posts.

Maybe there is some kind of conflict with another plugin. Could you give me list a installed plugins in your instance?

Also, could you check what is the type of those blank emails? You can find that information on the list of sent emails - https://fluka-forum.web.cern.ch/admin/email/sent

4 Likes

The email type is “mailing_list”.

The installed plugins are:

Name				           Version	Enabled? 	
discourse-akismet 		        0.1.0 	N 	
discourse-assign 		        0.1 	Y 	
discourse-calendar 		        0.2 	N 	
discourse-canned-replies 	    1.2 	Y 	
discourse-chat-integration 	    0.1 	N 	
discourse-data-explorer 	    0.2 	Y 	
jira 				            0.0.1 	Y 	
discourse-math 	         		0.9 	Y 	
discourse-migratepassword    	0.71 	Y 	
discourse-oauth2-basic 		    0.3 	Y 	
discourse-prometheus     		0.1 	Y 	
discourse-push-notifications   	0.3.0 	N 	
discourse-saved-searches 	    0.1 	N 	
discourse-solved 		        0.1 	Y 	
discourse-topic-trade-buttons   0.0.1 	N 	
discourse-voting 		        0.5 	Y
2 Likes

Hi @kris.kotlarek,

Type of those emails are mailing_list, see pic below:

Cheers,
Ismael

1 Like

I’d like to clarify.
The emails in @trobiyo’s snapshots correspond to the following actions:

#1 The user posts on the forum
#2 Moderator-A assigns the topic to moderator-B
#3 Is moderator-B’s reply to the user
#4 Moderator-B un-assigns the post

Also, it might be relevant for you to know, that the user “R” is both moderator and admin of the forum.

2 Likes

Thank you for all that information. It was super useful while searching for that bug.

I think I know what is happening. I guess that your moderators have that setting enabled:

The Discourse-assign plugin is actually creating a post with empty body visible for moderators each time someone is assigned/unassigned

That is why moderators receive an email with empty content. This behaviour is incorrect. I will work on a fix and will keep up updated.

5 Likes

Dear @kris.kotlarek,

I can confirm you’re right about the enable setting.
I will be “watching” :wink: this topic waiting for the fix.
Thank you

2 Likes

Really many thanks for your investigation, much appreciated :clap:

Cheers,
Ismael

1 Like

Fix was just merged and will be included in next beta :slight_smile:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/10577

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Thank you very much!

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