aysgarth

Thanks for the update, azure11. This will be useful, as we plan to run another auction, so I’ll know what to expect. As a matter of interest, did you space out the auction ends, or did they all take place at the exact same time? If they all ended at the same time, I can understand why the web site went down, but not if they were spaced out.
Thanks, Andrew

Hi Azure11,
We had our auctions finishing every 2 mins. It’s hard to say if increasing the time between finishes would help the situation. This is a bug in the code. You can introduce a workaround by editing the source code at wp-content/plugins/ultimate-auction/email-template.php

Simply delete lines 157, 158 and 160.

Code before editing:
if($email_sent)
{
update_post_meta( $auction_id, ‘auction_email_sent’, ‘sent’ );
}

Code after editing:
update_post_meta( $auction_id, ‘auction_email_sent’, ‘sent’ );

This will effectively remove the conditionality on marking the email as sent, so it will not retry it even if the email has failed.

If you make this fix, you will have to re-apply it after any update.

I don’t know why the author cannot fix this error. It seems strange that the recommendation for fixing a bug is to upgrade to the pro version, which more than likely contains the same bug.

It doesn’t make any difference whether emails are sent each time a page is loaded or on a cron timer. Even if a a cron timer is used it should not keep retrying for ever. There has to be a limit to the number of times that a failed email can be retried.

Thank you for your comments. However, what I would like to know is how I can stop Ultimate Auction from polling the web site with ajax requests every time I activate the plugin. The requests will stop when I deactivate the plugin, but then restart when I next activate the plugin. This has been the situation for several weeks, so it seems the plugin is now unusable even for a small number of auctions. There must be some way to stop the polling when I do not even have any live auctions running. I do not envisage running such a large number of auctions at one time again, so I do not think the Pro version is really worthwhile for me.