Problems with forum subscriptions

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  • jola
    New Member
    • Nov 2008
    • 29

    Problems with forum subscriptions

    We recently launched a new vBulletin forum. We are now experiencing problems with email subscriptions for one sub-forums. The first few days online subscriptions of entire sub-forums worked well for all sub-forums and subscribers got an email digest sent every day.

    In an attempt to direct discussions into the correct sub-sub-forums we after a couple of days turned off postings in one sub-forum. Without us knowing, that also turned off the possibility to subscribe to that sub-forum and subscriptions to that sub-forum stopped being sent out, although many sub-sub-forums were still open for postings and received many new posts.

    When we noticed this problem we turned on postings everywhere again. However, old and also new subscriptions are still not being sent out for this sub-forum. Subscriptions in other sub-forums, where we have not turned off/on postings, are working and have always worked well.

    We are not 100% sure what caused these subscription problems in this sub-forum, but since we turned off and on posts in that sub-forum we suspect that is the cause.

    Has anyone seen a similar sub-forum subscription problem?

    I can not see any log-files or any help in the manual to track down what might be causing these subscription problems for this sub-forum. Anyone have any ideas on how we should start investigate this problem?
  • Jake Bunce
    Senior Member
    • Dec 2000
    • 46598
    • 3.6.x

    #2
    Toggling the forum on and off shouldn't cause this.

    Make sure the users in question have permission to access the forum in question. A lack of forum permissions will stop the subscription emails.

    Comment

    • jola
      New Member
      • Nov 2008
      • 29

      #3
      I have tried everything and I'm still unable to get any subscribtion digest from this forum-branch where I turned off and on postings in some forums. Users can view and and subscribe to the forum, but no digests are ever sent out. I'm out of things to try now. Everything seems to work, but no digest for this forum is ever sent out. Digests for other forums are working perfectly.

      Comment

      • Jake Bunce
        Senior Member
        • Dec 2000
        • 46598
        • 3.6.x

        #4
        Maybe there is a problem with the scheduled task that sends out the emails. Note that digests are handled by a scheduled task:

        Admin CP -> Scheduled Tasks -> Scheduled Task Manager ->Daily Digest and Weekly Digest

        If you are testing your setup then you can manually run these tasks.

        The task system is driven by page loads. If your forum isn't very active for a period of time then the tasks might be delayed.

        Also make sure your forum URL is correct because that is used to call the tasks:

        Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Site Name / URL / Contact Details -> Forum URL

        And try reverting your footer template because it contains code that drives the task system:

        Admin CP -> Styles & Templates -> Style Manager -> Common Templates (in the menu) -> footer

        Comment

        • jola
          New Member
          • Nov 2008
          • 29

          #5
          I've looked at these settings and everything seems to be okay. Note that digests are working for all other sub-forums except for the ones where we turned off and on postings. The sub-forums with problems are not receiving any posts themselves, but contain sub-sub-forums that do receive many posts. There are many visitors passing through all these forums. You can see the forum with problems here: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/openfoam If I subscribe to this forum and also some of the sub-sub-forums in this tree I do get digests for the sub-sub-forums but not any digest for this forum.

          Comment

          • Jake Bunce
            Senior Member
            • Dec 2000
            • 46598
            • 3.6.x

            #6
            I didn't think that works. As far as I know you need to subscribe to each individual child forum. You can't just subscribe to the parent.

            Comment

            • jola
              New Member
              • Nov 2008
              • 29

              #7
              Oh, the default FAQ text in vBulletin does say:

              If the forum that you are subscribing to has any child forums (forums within a forum) then your subscription will be extended to these automatically.
              This also did work the first couple of days after we launched the forum. It stopped working about the same time as we switched off the postings in this forum-root, but we aren't 100% sure that is what caused it to break.

              Comment

              • jola
                New Member
                • Nov 2008
                • 29

                #8
                I have debugged this a bit more in a test forum. If the sub-forum root that you subscribe to does not contain any messages at all then no digest is sent out at all for subscriptions for that sub-forum root.

                If the sub-forum root does contain a message (I'm not sure if it has to be new or if any message at all is enough) then a daily digest will be sent out for subsciptions to the sub-forum root, and the digest will include all new and updated threads in all child forums below this sub-forum root.

                This looks like a bug in the the vBulletin subscriptions. It works well if the subforum root contains messages and breaks if the subforum root does not contain any messages, although child-forums do contain many new messages.
                Last edited by jola; Tue 31 Mar '09, 6:48am. Reason: small corrections

                Comment

                • Jake Bunce
                  Senior Member
                  • Dec 2000
                  • 46598
                  • 3.6.x

                  #9
                  You can't subscribe to categories.

                  Comment

                  • jola
                    New Member
                    • Nov 2008
                    • 29

                    #10
                    it is a sub-forum, not a category

                    Yes I've understood that, but this is not a category, it is a sub-forum open for posts and the subscription function does not work correctly if the sub-forum root does not have any new posts in it.

                    I'll take a look on the source code in functions_digest.php code to see if I can find the bug myself, but all those SQL statements with inner joins takes some time to understand fully Thanks for your help anyway, I guess I'm on my own from here.

                    By the way, a nice feature to implement in the future is to also allow subscriptions for categories. Since you allow it for sub-forums and include forum childs it seems natural to also allow it for categories.

                    Comment

                    • mk132
                      Senior Member
                      • May 2004
                      • 129

                      #11
                      Jola,

                      Did you ever find a solution to this? I am experiencing the same problem:
                      Daily digest email subscriptions to sub-forums of one of my categories are not going out. Other daily digest emails are.

                      I checked sendmail's log and can confirm that they are not being sent, so it isn't a SPAM filter problem.

                      My next step is to file a bug report here.

                      Comment

                      • jola
                        New Member
                        • Nov 2008
                        • 29

                        #12
                        The problem is that subscription emails for an entire sub-forum tree are only being sent out if the sub-forum has received new posts. If you, for example, have a sub-forum root that only receives messages now and then, but this forum has active sub-sub-forums that do receive new messages often. Then the sub-sub-forums below the fairly non-active sub-forum will not get their messages included in the daily email digest.

                        I have given up on getting vBulletin to do this as I want and have instead implemented a majordomo based mailing list which I use to send subscription emails from certain forum-parts.

                        Comment

                        • mk132
                          Senior Member
                          • May 2004
                          • 129

                          #13
                          Thanks. I see now that your problem was different from mine. I'll instigate a little more before filing a bug report for my problem.

                          Comment

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