On our Discourse instance I have all of my categories being watched by default, but new posts don’t seem to be sending notifications anymore and it seems like that’s happening on ALL accounts on our site.
Confusingly, certain users’ posts get sent through when they reply to the original post, though, so I think there’s a setting I changed by accident or without fully understanding what it did.
I’ve been pouring over the settings, both global and on my own user, to see what the issue or conflict could be but I can’t figure it out.
Any suggestions for what this might be, or how to more effectively debug? Thanks!
This also might be related to the approval workflow, since I’m noticing it specifically when the first post has to be approved…it doesn’t get sent out to users even when they are watching the category posted into.
Update: this def seems like it might be associated with certain user permission levels. When someone who is NOT a new user posts a reply (in the case of my test, a fellow moderator) an email gets sent as expected. So it seems to have something to do with new, “untrusted” users.
I’m totally stumped where that setting might be, though totally willing to admit that I could easily be overlooking it. Appreciate any help pointing me to the right spot!
Regarding the approval queue: are you approving the posts that are not being sent? Or the posts are going through without approval but not being emailed?
I am approving posts that are not being sent, and the posts that ARE being sent do not need to be approved (they are coming from users with a higher trust level).
I believe so - it’s a fairly new forum so I’m still getting things sorted, but it’s tough to tell because all of the members before recently were being added with mod status to help with a topic categorization project. During that process, with everyone at mod level, things worked as expected.
Now we are open to all, and I am honestly not sure if this stems from a setting before we allowed public registration or after the recent new approval queue was released.
Is there a mode that I can put discourse into that simulates notifications being sent, for testing purposes? I’m trying to debug this without sending tons of emails to everyone who signed up.
I recommend looking at individual accounts here. As an admin you can navigate to the use profiles and see what is set there. What do you see on problem accounts?
Here’s what I’ve done to investigate individual accounts and test:
On the receiving end, the problem impacts all accounts including admins and mods. Nobody is receiving first post notifications after approving a new user’s post, even when the user is set to “watch first post” (which is our default for all new users on almost all of our categories)
I tried making a new post from a brand new user, whose first 5 posts needs to be approved. It showed up in the approval queue as expected. I approved it, and it showed up on the forum, but no notification was sent to ANY users (including admins and mods, see above).
Then I tried making a new post from an existing admin/mod. That post skipped the approval queue as expected, and the email was sent to everyone with the “watching first post” setting as expected.
I’m running the latest codebase. I have no custom settings on the trust levels screen.
I do have the “approve post count” set to 5 since we do have non-spammer users who we often have to guide to community norms around things like self promotion, so I like being able to approve their first 5 posts manually no matter what. But that seems to be the only setting that could be tied to this (even though it doesn’t make sense why it would).
I’m willing to pay for help with this, if there’s a recommended path for that. I just can’t seem to figure out what’s causing this first post for new users to skip the email notification system.
Whew, thanks. I’m glad to have that cleared up, I was worried I had misconfigured something!
Presuming that I could/should use my last post as a template for providing as much detail/testing as possible, especially when it’s a reproducible issue.
You could, but honestly each bug is different. Sometimes a person reports a bug and I immediately know the reason. At other times I just have to keep asking and digging more until I figure it out. This was one the latter
