Notification settings - clarification question

adam42

Hopefully a quick question about notifications, esp. email. If I have "Someone creates a new post or reply" checked in my notifications settings, does this send me a notification regardless of whether or not I visit the forum before it sends the notification?

Just to help me understand what to expect, if I have this notification setting above checked, that means that it overrides any of the other settings further down the list? (e.g. "Someone posts in a tag I'm following")

BTW, are email notifications instant or batched?

Thanks

clarkwinkelmann

The notifications are sent/queued immediately when posted, so they will go out even if you visit the forum a split second after the content has been created.

Generally, each notification settings will trigger a separate email. But Flarum has some logic to "de-duplicate" emails which is very confusing to understand, so I will not pretend I know how it really works. So you might sometimes get just one email, but there are still situations where it could be duplicated. We addressed this in the Digest extension which removes the de-duplication code and then merges all notifications into a new custom email

adam42

OK yes, looks like Digest is the way to go.

I have both FoF Subscribed and Subscriptions extensions installed - it looks like:

the former sets up notification toggles for the user settings interface
the second provides the "Follow" button on threads

Is that correct? If so, is it also correct that the "follow" functionality is core Flarum, i.e. when you start or reply to a thread, flarum remembers that you are following the thread?

Since I'm asking, are the icons on the user notification setting items related to the extension that provides the setting?

clarkwinkelmann

Yes I think that's about it.

adam42 is it also correct that the "follow" functionality is core Flarum

No, that feature is from Subscriptions itself. FoF Follow Tags implements something similar but for tags directly. Flarum core only provides the API to add notification preferences to the settings page and a pivot table where extensions can store user-discussion properties like the follow mode.

adam42 are the icons on the user notification setting items related to the extension that provides the setting?

I think most extensions try to use the same icon but they can use a different one. Sone extensions provide multiple notification settings so they might decide to use multiple icons to distinguish them.

adam42

Hmm, that's puzzling me still. I have these notification settings switched on on my discussion board:

Someone creates a discussion
Someone creates a new post or reply

and I don't have any other notification settings on. I don't get notifications in a thread like this. However I do get them from this flarum board - and checking my profile settings here, I see that those two notification settings above don't exist. Is that because you're using a different extension?

I am trying to establish how to set up new users with a sensible set of default notifications and I thought those 2 settings above would notify about every new message, but they don't. I can of course just ignore them and work out a different combination of notification setting defaults for new users but it'd be nice to know what's going on.

clarkwinkelmann

FoF Subscribed and FoF Follow Tags implement similar features but Subscribed is global only while Follow Tags has more options and is configured per tag.

adam42

Just double checked and I see that FoF Subscribed is the extension that owns those notification settings ("Someone creates a new post or reply" and "Someone creates a discussion")

In its admin config, I've got the "Allowed to receive notification upon new post or reply" group permissions set to Global.

It doesn't work though, not for this situation like the dialog in this thread. I don't receive notifications when just "Someone creates a new post or reply" is checked and all the other permissions are unchecked. I'll just retest it though just to make doubly sure.

It seems I must have a much older version of FoF Subscribed than on this forum though, since the text appearing in my notification settings is different, so I guess I'll have to check the upgrade - can't do that without my laptop right now though.

clarkwinkelmann

adam42 if you are able, share your php flarum info output so we can see all extensions and their version.

Are you getting other notification emails? If you are not receiving anything verify whether you configured your forum to use a queue (which is recommended for these kind of extensions that send many emails "at the same time"). If you configured a queue and are not receiving anything, the queue worker might not be running.