Notifications sending process is stuck

Hi wbrzosko,

Thanks for trying out Post Notif. I am sorry to hear you’re running into issues with the send post notification process failing to complete. Both email sending and delivery are black holes of misery, IMHO, so I can’t say with any confidence that it has anything to do with either Gmail or Wordfence. ??

I am aware, however, of the inability to (easily) cancel initiated send processes and this is on my “to repair” list. It is actually a part of my overall planned revamping of the send notification’s architecture which will also include allowing admins to more specifically configure their send preferences (to avoid timeouts for large subscriber lists and account for differences in hosting providers’ email send limits).

There is not presently any logging available, but, if you have access to your database directly, with a specific post_id value in hand, you can:

(1) Search for post_notif_count_sent_post_id_[POST ID VALUE] in the [wp_]options table to see exactly how many notifications were sent for this post

(2) Determine the set of subscribers to whom notifications WERE sent to by selecting some/all of the columns in the [wp_]post_notif_subscriber table, including “ORDER BY id”, and LIMIT [INTEGER SHOWN IN ROW FOUND BY (1) ]

(3) Cancel the stuck process by searching for post_notif_count_to_send_post_id_[POST ID VALUE] in wp_options and deleting this row. If you are going to do this, I’d encourage you to delete the row found by (1) as well

I hope this helps alleviate some of the aggravation this has caused you and can potentially tide you over until I can get this fixed. If not, I know there are other highly-regarded post notification plugins here in the www.ads-software.com directory and would encourage you to check them out to see if they better suit your needs.

Thanks,
Devon

Hi wbrzosko, hi Devon,

the offered solution is not very useful as the same issue occurs next time again. My subscriber list also contains about 500 users. The reason is the runtime the script need. I explained it in “how much time?”. For 500 subscribers you will need about 10 min (or more on a slow server).

My workaround is slightly pedestrian, but works and maybe it helps you:
All subscribers without selected categories (subscribed all categories) I export into a csv-file and delete them in post-notif. This is the majority of subscribers. In post-notif remain only a few subscribers, which selected different categories and my own address. So post-notif works fine.
Then I forward the received notification via mail merge to the exported subscriber list. In the “Post notification email body” I delete the link to @@prefsurl an leave the tag:
mail with subject <b>STOP</b> (klick)
My workaround is not only long-winded but has another disadvantage: If subscriber doesn’t select a category immediately after subscription he furthermore will not have the possibility for it.

So I wait next version and hope at long last it will contain “something similar to the “batching” of notifications” ;).

Greetings
oekoplatt

Hi oekoplatt and wbrzosko,

You have been very patient; that is an indisputable fact!! I hope you’ll be happy to hear that I’ve just released Post Notif v1.2.0-1 BETA (available from: https://devonostendorf.com/projects/post-notif-1-2-0/), which might alleviate some of the hassle you’ve been contending with, in that it will allow you to pause and resume your send process if/when it gets hung up. Admittedly, this is NOT the full solution you are after but I needed to make the included infrastructure changes in this release to support the batch configuration functionality, which I am working on now, and which will be in the next beta release (slated for completion midweek, barring unforeseen complications).

If one or both of you have development and/or test environments (as you know I love you say, I would strongly advise against running beta releases in production!), I would sincerely appreciate your feedback if you are willing and able to try out 1.2.0-1 BETA while you wait for me to get to the point where I can confidently release the full version 1.2.0.

Thanks,
Devon

Just a quick note to correct autocorrect. ?? Though I do love all the people who use Post Notif, the second paragraph of my post above was intended to be:

“If one or both of you have development and/or test environments (as you know I love to say, I would strongly advise against running beta releases in production!), I would sincerely appreciate your feedback if you are willing and able to try out 1.2.0-1 BETA while you wait for me to get to the point where I can confidently release the full version 1.2.0.”

Thanks,
Devon

Hi oekoplatt and wbrzosko,

I wanted to let you both know that I’ve just released Post Notif v1.2.0-2 BETA (available from: https://devonostendorf.com/projects/post-notif-1-2-0/), which includes both the batch configuration functionality and logic to handle avoiding PHP script timeouts during the post notification send process.

If one or both of you are willing to test this out in your own development and/or test environments, I would tremendously appreciate your feedback!

Please note that if you happen to have applied v1.2.0-1 BETA, you’ll need to manually decrement the post_notif_db_version (in the options table) back down to 5
(it was updated to 6 in 1.2.0-1 BETA and 1.2.0-2 BETA makes additional changes to default settings and custom table schema).

Thanks,
Devon