Repeated reminders
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I did a test signup for an event and I’ve gotten 3 emails in 3h today. I have First Reminder # of Days set at ‘1’ and ‘0’ for the second reminder.
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Make that 4 emails in 4 hours. Plugin is trying damn hard to make sure I don’t forget that I volunteered…
3 reminder emails? Or are you counting the confirmation email, and the admin notification of reminders sent?
I just did a test of my system for a single event for today, setting first reminder to 1 and second to 0, and manually triggered the CRON function via the “Send Reminders” link on the CRON Functions page, and it worked exactly as expected for me… only sending the first reminder one time (along with the admin notification).
Perhaps there is an issue with permissions on your system so that when the CRON function runs its not allowing it to update the database so that the reminder sent field gets updated?
I have had no other reports of this thing happening, and I can’t make it happen on my system in the test I just did.
If you have access to PHPMyAdmin, take a look at the pta_sus_signups table and see if the reminder1_sent value is getting updated. It’s a simple boolean field and will be 0 if it hasn’t been sent yet, and should change to 1 when the reminder is sent.
If it’s set as 1, but you are still getting those reminders, then there may be a database compatibility issue where 1 and 0 aren’t getting properly evaluated as true/false. I have had a similar issue with something else in the past, on very specific database systems, and would have to look at my code to refresh my memory on how the reminder sent values are being checked in this plugin.
The admin notification (set with the sheet) went to someone else – I only used my email as the test volunteer.
The reminder1_sent number in phpmyadmin is ‘0’. Same for reminder2_sent.
Something on your site/server is keeping the reminder sent value from being updated, so my plugin is doing its job and continuing to send the reminder because it thinks it has not been sent yet.
Are you triggering the reminders manually with the “Send Reminders” function from the CRON Functions admin page? If not, perhaps try that and see if the value gets updated, since it won’t really be running as a CRON function at that point (that function just calls the reminder function manually, and updates the last run time manually as well).
I had CRON notifications on, turned it off just now to see if it does anything. I’ll know within an hour if it’s fixed or not.
I guess I could try disabling message #1 in favor of message #2 and see if that helps later.
Some more details, if it matters:
I did two test sign ups:
#1 was when I was logged into the site. the user_id shows 1 in pta_sus_signups.
#2 was from an incognito window, where user_id shows 0. I had put in a fake email but I just changed that to a real email to see if the messages are going out.Did you try to hit the “Send Reminders” button on the CRON Functions page of my plugin? No need to wait for an hour, as that will call the same function that the CRON hook calls. However, if you hit that buttons a few times, but it only sends the reminder the first time, then we know that the function is working correctly, but that somehow when called from the WordPress CRON hook it is not being allowed to update the database.
Are you using any database “optimization” plugins? On a multi-site?
What type of server are you on? What is the installed database and schema?
Regarding the user ids, those are correct. For the original admin account of a site, the user id is 1. If you are not logged in (a guest), then user id is 0. That has nothing to do with reminders, though.
I’m not sure how much support I can give you on this without access to your server, as this appears to be a unique server/database issue and not anything with my plugin since it works just fine for me, and nobody else is experiencing the same issue (would have definitely had multiple reports about it by now).
As a last resort, perhaps try completely uninstalling the plugin, and dropping those tables from your database, and then reinstall. Perhaps something got corrupted in the install that is preventing those fields from being written to. Either that, or the database system on your server doesn’t like the BOOL field type???
Did you try to hit the “Send Reminders” button on the CRON Functions page of my plugin?
I just did it twice and it sent reminders twice and both times said ‘0 reminders sent’.
Are you using any database “optimization” plugins? On a multi-site?
Yes & yes – since you asked, I’m going to presume this is why. I recently changed DB backup plugins to one that optimizes too. Let me know what to change/edit/turn off.
I believe it was an issue long ago with this same plugin, where somebody had one of those db optimizer plugins installed, and it screwed things up. I did some searching back then about the issue, and, if I remember correct, it was something about how that particular plugin tried to rename tables, or how it handled certain types of data (like Bool), that made it break several plugins (not just mine) that used custom tables for their data.
If it’s possible to revert back and undo the database changes that plugin made, I would start with that and see if that fixes things. The other issue was a long time ago, though, and I don’t remember any specifics… I just seem to remember that it was resolved by that guy completely starting over with his WordPress site since he couldn’t revert the changes the plugin made, and not using that plugin any more since it was much more trouble than it was worth. I couldn’t tell you the name of the plugin, though, so I wouldn’t know if it’s the same one you are using now. Always a good idea not to mess with database structures after everything has already been set up, though!
I also looked at your profile, out of curiosity, to see if you had other potential database type issues with other plugins, and see in your history some things that point in that direction. Some of them being shown to be a problem with the server setup with your hosting company. So, again, that could be an issue as well if they are using a server setup that is not the typical or recommended WordPress setup.
I’m happy to try to give you some ideas on where to look, but again, this does not seem to be a problem with the code of my plugin, and is starting to get beyond the scope of free support for a free plugin. If you are using a plugin that is altering the structure/format/naming of the database tables, or on a system with an obscure or non-standard database system, I’m not sure what I could possibly do in the code of this plugin (which started its life out as another plugin from another developer and already had the database structure set up before I forked my own version of it) that would fix your issues.
I agree it’s not your plugin. I turned off the reminders, we can email folks manually or contact them on Facebook.
This is happening on my site as well. One of our users reported getting an hourly email for an event that shouldn’t have a reminder until October 12.
Have you tested it yourself? Create a test event and sign-up with one of your own emails, and then go to the CRON Functions page of my plugin and hit the send reminders button several times, see how many emails you get, and how many emails it says it sent after you hit the button each time.
I won’t repeat everything I said above, but unless I know a LOT more details about exactly what is happening, and with the specific server & database configurations where your site is hosted, along with other plugins / theme, and versions of everything, there simply is nothing I can do since I am unable to reproduce the problem on my own server. So far, it’s just you two that have reported this, so perhaps if you both can list as much info about your server, database, plugins, etc., we can try to figure out what is common between your two servers that is causing issues.
echoleaf already was able to look at the database tables and could see that the reminder1_sent value was NOT getting updated from 0 to 1 (false to true) after the reminder was sent, and so my plugin doesn’t think the reminder was sent every time it checks and will continue to do its job and trigger those emails every hour. That is a simple database table row update operation, but somehow it is either not getting called, or is failing to properly update those values on echoleaf’s server. Works just fine on my server, though, and must be working for the majority of other users as current stats show this plugin is active on over 1000 sites.
If we can get more specifics and narrow down the specific issue as to why these values are not getting updated with certain server configurations, perhaps I can do some searching and then “possibly” find some code to add that allows me to check the server configuration and do things differently so that it is compatible.
I tend to think it has something to do with the BOOL fields that may not be compatible with some database systems, as the fields that store the user data and all the sheet and tasks are obviously getting properly updated. Perhaps try toggling the “Visible” value for sheets, as well as the option to show clear links (on the edit sheet page) and see if those values are saved properly and behave as expected on the front end. Those fields are both also stored as BOOL values. That would help to narrow it down to a problem with the specific BOOL field values, or something else if those work properly.
It worked great in our dev environment, but not in production. I’ll try to get you some more answers. Unfortunately, it’s not my production server, so might be a bit limited.
“reminder1_sent value was NOT getting updated from 0 to 1 (false to true) after the reminder was sent, and so my plugin doesn’t think the reminder was sent every time it checks and will continue to do its job and trigger those emails every hour”
The user that reported this is signed up for an event on October 17, with 5 and 1 day reminders. Shouldn’t his reminder1_sent value stay at 0 until October 12?
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