Home Forums WordPress Plugins Auto subscribe to all forums resolved when bbPNNS disabled

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    • #4524
      Teri Rose
      Guest

      Hi Vinny-

      I wanted to share an issue I just worked through with you. I use the WPLMS theme for my site to manage a course. WPLMS has an auto subscribe feature for any forum linked to a course.

      Last week BuddyBoss developers created a new test forum (not linked to a course), yet all students were auto subscribed to that test forum and received all email notifications of that testing activity (monitored by Email Log plugin; forum was created at 3:52pm all students received notifications at 4:02pm eliminating possibility that they voluntarily subscribed to forum).

      I created a ticket with WPLMS assuming this had to be a bug with the auto subscribe feature and that students were being subscribed to all forums. They replied this morning that it wasn’t a theme issue.

      My next step was to deactive the bbPNNS plugin —> created a new test forum —> created a new topic and new reply —> no notifications were sent (except to admin).

      I did have bbPNNS settings checked to take over subscriptions from WP. Thoughts on what could have caused the conflict?

    • #4525
      vinny
      Keymaster

      Hi Teri,

      There are a bunch of moving parts, but this is basically how it works…

      Upon creation of a new topic or reply (let’s call them ‘posts’ for brevity), bbPress triggers the new_topic or new_reply action, which bbpnns is tied into.

      bbpnns will check which roles are supposed to be notified upon new posts, loads all users for all selected roles, uniquely, and sends out one message to each person.

      At the same time, bbPress loads all users that were subscribed to the forum (for new topics) or to the topic (for new replies) and tries to send a message to those people.

      bbpnns hooks into one of the filters inside that bbPress mailout function and takes over, but only if the respective forum/topic Override core option is checked in the settings. If it is checked, it replaces the body of the message and sends out a one email to each recipient (as opposed to one email with all recipients BCC’d, which is what bbPress wants to do).

      So if you had a role set that would encompass all users and bbpnns was active, that would explain why they all received notifications.

      Cheers,
      Vinny

    • #4526
      Teri Rose
      Guest

      Thank you, this explanation is helpful. Here is what I still don’t understand. If WPLMS auto subscribe features turns all users into a ‘subscriber’ role and I have the role ‘subscriber’ checked in bbPNNS settings to receive notifications – how does bbPNNS distinguish between multiple site forums for whether or not a user is subscribed to that one specifically and qualifies for notifications? Even despite WPLMS auto subscribe, when any user subscribes to a forum their role would change to ‘subscriber’ in their user profile and would this be used by bbPNNS under the ‘subscriber’ role to hook them into all forum notifications?

      What am I missing?

    • #4527
      vinny
      Keymaster

      Forget about bbPress subscriptions for a moment.

      Your users are getting notified because you have ‘Subscriber’ role set to receive notifications, and WPLMS is setting everyone to ‘Subscriber’ when they sign up.

      I don’t know how WPLMS’ auto subscribe works, as I’d never heard of WPLMS until this thread.

      Let’s take a few steps back and assess your needs. Why do you have bbpnns installed in the first place? It’s usually for people who want to send mass notifications to entire roles when any new bbpress post is created.

    • #4528
      Teri Rose
      Guest

      I installed bbpnns because bbPress notifications were inconsistent and not being sent in many cases. Reply notifications were also not being sent even with “Notify me of follow-up replies via email” as checked. In bbPress support topics with users having similar trouble, they noted that the issues were resolved by using bbpnns. After installing bbpnns, notifications became consistent with the single forum I had. It wasn’t until this past week when a second forum was created that my current issue surfaced.

      I also like being able to edit the body of the email notification through your plugin and set the excerpt length.

    • #4530
      vinny
      Keymaster

      Thanks for the review of bbpnns :). I’d be great if you could review it in wordpress.org.

      Now that I understand your needs, just go ahead and de-select the Subscriber checkbox role from Settings > Forums > Email Notifications, but make sure Override Subscriptions… is checked.

      That way you will not have mass mailouts to SUbscriber role members, but will still have the benefit of controlling the body of subscription mailouts.

      Cheers!

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