Notifications Not Working for a Specific Forum Category

Product Support

AI-generated summary

In the Support category, omppatil reports that notifications are failing for one specific forum category despite users being subscribed with ‘Watching’ status. While notifications work for other categories, this one sends no email or desktop alerts to any of its 500–600 subscribers. The category allows only admins to create topics (averaging 10/day), while TL1+ group members can view and reply. Topics include blogs followed by all users. dax suggests investigating actual user subscription levels via Data Explorer, checking for rate limits, email quotas, or log anomalies — noting that skipped/bounced logs show no entries for this category. pfaffman asks if topics are being moved post-creation (a known past bug), but omppatil confirms topics are created directly in the category. No clear cause is yet identified, but possibilities include category-specific security settings, rate limiting, or a regression bug.

1

Hello!
I have multiple categories in my forum, and most users have subscribed to these categories with the subscription preference set to ‘Watching.’ Recently, an issue has arisen where users receive email and desktop notifications for all categories except for one particular category. This category does not send notifications to any users.
I’m confused about why only this specific category is affected. Could it be due to heavy traffic in that category, or is it because it has the highest number of subscribers?

3

Well, first try to figure out how many users actually have that particular category in the “watching” list. If you have the data explorer plugin installed you can run this query

-- [params]
-- int :category_id

SELECT
    cu.user_id,
    CASE
        WHEN u.admin THEN 'Admin'
        WHEN u.moderator THEN 'Moderator'
        ELSE 'Regular User'
    END AS user_type,
    CASE
        WHEN cu.notification_level = 3 THEN 'Watching'
        WHEN cu.notification_level = 2 THEN 'Tracking'
        WHEN cu.notification_level = 4 THEN 'Watching First Post'
        WHEN cu.notification_level = 0 THEN 'Muted'
        ELSE 'Regular'
    END AS notification_status,
    STRING_AGG(g.name, ', ') AS custom_group_names
FROM
    category_users cu
JOIN
    users u ON cu.user_id = u.id
LEFT JOIN
    group_users gu ON gu.user_id = u.id
LEFT JOIN
    groups g ON gu.group_id = g.id AND g.automatic = false
WHERE
    cu.category_id = :category_id
GROUP BY
    cu.user_id, u.admin, u.moderator, cu.notification_level
ORDER BY
    cu.notification_level

There can be several factors that affect notifications, starting from site settings, category security settings, rate limits, and so on.
The best thing you can do is to try to investigate real-world examples of users who are not getting the notifications they should. Maybe they have reached their daily quota of emails sent? Have you investigated the logs of sent , skipped, bounced emails?

5

Hi @dax, I have a category with security settings where group members with trust level 1 can view and reply to topics. Only admins can create topics, and on average, 10 topics are created in this category each day. There are around 500 to 600 users subscribed to “Watching” for that category.

I investigated the logs for sent, skipped, and bounced emails but didn’t find anything. The skipped emails log doesn’t show any emails related to topics in this category, and the bounced emails section says 'No Logs Found.

6

Are you creating the topic or moving it to the category after it’s been created? There was a bug like this a long while ago, but perhaps there’s a regression?

7

No, I’m not moving it to the category after it’s been created.The topic is created in the category itself.

8

Only admins can create topics in this category, whereas subscribed users can only reply to them. The topics in this category include blogs, which are posts that all users follow.