In a discussion about controlling who receives pending user reminder emails, Bas notes that only three staff members (two admins, one moderator) receive notifications, despite having eight total staff. codinghorror suggests all staff should receive them unless they’re actively online. david clarifies that only moderators—not all admins—receive the notifications, and recommends granting moderation rights to admins who should receive them. He also notes the system avoids sending duplicate notifications to those with existing unseen alerts. codinghorror confirms this is intentional, as admins aren’t meant to handle daily moderation. neil adds that moderators must watch the moderators inbox to receive notifications, though david notes this doesn’t affect pending approval PMs. neil confirms these are private messages. Bas reports inconsistencies: among five admin-moderators, only three (including system) receive the PM, and among two moderators-only, only one does. Bas speculates the same logic used for flag notifications might apply. neil clarifies the message is posted to the moderators group. danekhollas suggests Bas may be confused by only three moderators being @mentioned in the message. neil explains that only the three most recently active moderators are directly pinged; others receive it in the moderator group inbox, and anyone watching that inbox gets notified. Bas confirms this understanding and finds the system clever but potentially confusing.
Currently a PM / Email is sent when there are pending users (after one hour, controlled by pending_users_reminder_delay.
Is there any way I can control who receives this? Currently it is sent to three people (two admins, one moderator) out of a total staff of eight.
All staff should get it, are you sure the others were not actively pinging the server with an open web browser at the time? Cc @neil
I ran into this a while back, the notification is only sent to moderators, and admins are not necessarily moderators. To get the notifications sent to everyone, click “grant moderation” for all of your admins.
We actually find this quite useful, because we have technical administrators that we do not want to be bothered by these notifications. But maybe this is actually a bug @codinghorror?
@bas, the other condition you might be hitting is that the notification will not be sent to anyone that already has an unseen pending_users notification.
This is intentional, the idea is that admins are not really there to run the site day to day.
In the case of the pending approval notification, this doesn’t make any difference at the moment 
Oh true, this one is just a private message.
Interesting, agree that only sending it to moderators is the desired behaviour.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t conform to my experiences here.
We have two moderators-only-not-admins, one of them gets the email.
We have five admins-who-are-also-moderator, three of them (including system) get the PM.
Could it be that the same logic is applied here?
What do you mean? Not sure why you quoted that sentence. The logic is: “The message is posted to the moderators group.”
I think @Bas was also confused about the fact that while the message is sent to the moderator group, only 3 moderators are explicitly @mentioned in the message body, which is what that quote refers to I believe.
Aha, so maybe by “PM” he means “notification”. Correct, only the 3 most recently active moderators will be directly pinged. All other moderators get the message in the moderator group inbox. Anyone else “watching” the moderator group inbox will get notified too.
Yes to both 
Ah, that explains a lot of the confusion.
It’s a neat mechanic, though I think it adds more confusion than clarity
