Question

Troubleshooting missing email notifications

  • 5 December 2019
  • 9 replies
  • 164 views

Badge +1

Hi All - Is there anything going on with the platform in regards to email notifications? I’ve had a couple employees and now a member tell me they stopped receiving emails.

If there’s nothing going on platform-wide, how can I troubleshoot this?

Thanks for any help!


9 replies

Hi Kristen! So there was a delay in notifications from over the weekend due to an issue with a piece of supporting infrastructure - email service was resolved around 11am on the 3rd December and everything that had been stored in the email queue was released over the course of the afternoon and everything delivered normally (albeit a bit late for some of the emails). Notifications should be working normally for users again now :slight_smile:

Userlevel 2
Badge +3

Hi,

to add to what Tom said, if you want to troubleshoot if someone should have received a notification, here some tips:

General:

  • Always make sure a user has not disabled a notification type in his/her settings page (you need to ask the user, there is no way to check it yourself)
  • If it is a new user, let them check in their spam folder
  • Always ask for which topic a notification is missing

In order to check it yourself for a specific, you need to understand how notifications work. Here an overview:

  • @mention notification: Sent every time a user is mentioned
  • new topic notification (category subscribe): Sent every time a new topic is published
  • private message notification: Sent for every private message a user receives
  • “new reply”- & “marked as answered”-notification (topic subscribe): Only sent once until the user visits the topic again while logged in

Tip: I always test general notification functionality by sending private messages, as this works quick and easy without interference on the public community.

Now you need to do a little bit of detective work. 🙂 If the user provides you with a topic where this user is missing a notification for, then first check when the user was active in that topic for the last time.

The timestamp of the next comment is when the notification should have been sent. Ask the user if this notification was received and if the user has visited the topic afterwards. If so, check the next comment timestamp - this again should be the moment when the notification has been sent.

I hope that this helps to figure out if there actually is an issue, or if there is a misunderstanding… Of course you can always reach out to our support team if you see a concrete case where no notification has been received! :envelope:

@timcavey this could explain some of the issues we had with this previously.  Could be useful to take a look. 

Badge +1

Hi Kristen! So there was a delay in notifications from over the weekend due to an issue with a piece of supporting infrastructure - email service was resolved around 11am on the 3rd December and everything that had been stored in the email queue was released over the course of the afternoon and everything delivered normally (albeit a bit late for some of the emails). Notifications should be working normally for users again now :slight_smile:

Would this have caused some people to receive notifications twice? See image:

 

 

Userlevel 2
Badge +3

Hi Kristen!

I quickly checked for your community, this is not related to the issue described above, but rather a setting that causes this.

You have set up (the same) rank notifications for the first two ranks (Do Gooder + Do Gooder (employee)). As far as I can see your colleagues get the latter rank once you assign a custom role to them.

As they receive the first rank automatically after registration, they will already have received the first private message. Once you give them the employee role, they get the second message.

An easy fix would be to adjust the second (employee) rank notification to something different (informing them that they are officially marked as employee now).

Or do you automatically assign the custom role to your colleagues (by login method)?If so, then there are other changes which I could recommend you to improve their experience.

Please let me know if you need help or if there are additional questions!

Badge +1

Ahh, okay. That makes sense. I’ll adjust the message. 

Right not I’m assigning that custom role manually. Would be sweet if that could be done by login method since we do have an SSO for employees.

Userlevel 2
Badge +3

Ok, great to hear that. I know that some SSO-login methods allow us to automatically identify certain user groups (employees) & assign custom user roles based on that. But I am not sure if all SSO protocols support such a flow.

If you want to learn more about it, I would recommend to get in touch with our support team, they can give you more information on this matter. :)

Badge +1

This leads me to a second question. I have identical ranks - but one is for employees and the other for non-employees. I don’t want employees to have both - ONLY the employee one. Is there a way to do that? Exclude roles?

Julian is correct that with all SSO protocols you could assign a custom user role automatically so then your employees wouldn’t get the ‘normal user rank’, they would instantly get the ‘employee user rank’.

And you can decide which user roles can get a rank, you can select or deselect all of them in the settings

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