Hi.

I've recently installed YAF as a forum on our new website - very happy with it generally and have managed to integrate it within the overall site - all good stuff. After playing around with the previous release I decided to 'upgrade' to try out the latest beta version that has just been made available (1.9.6 BETA1) so I'm not sure if the problem I'm reporting here is specific to that beta or whether it is a wider (or even non YAF) problem I'm afraid.

Basically everything is working fine except notifications of new topics. I have tried this with a number of test accounts and whether I actually receive a notification or not is random and sporadic - sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I have checked that emails in general work (they do) and that the user profiles are enabled for notifications correctly (they are).

As an example, I setup three test accounts and pointed these to three email addresses I have. I then made them all watch a particular forum for new posts. When I made a new posting using a forth account, sometimes 1 of the accounts got a notification, sometimes 2, sometimes none....

Is anyone else having a similar problem?

I am a relative newbie to YAF (although have some battle scars along the way :-)) but I'm not sure if there are any log files or similar that I could look at to see if emails are being attempted or not etc. Any suggestions on how to debug this?

Thanks a lot for for your help.

Huw

Since posting this I have done some further investigation of this problem - there is definitely a repeatable problem (at least in my hosted environment). This relates to the latest beta release 1.9.6 Beta1 running an a separate .Net framework 4 application server and separate web SQL 2008 server. As a newbie, not sure whether to post in the separate issues database - please advise?

Bear with me and I'll step through the test...

I created 4 test users (Test 1,2,3 and 4) posting to 4 different email accounts. I tested that the basic email functionality worked from YAF by using the admin function to post to all users - which worked fine. All 4 test users received an email correctly.

I created a new Forum and made Test 1,2 and 3 watch that forum for new topics. I then created new topics in the forum using a variety of those test users and monitored which of the other users received notifications. The results were as follows (bear with me on this for a little while :-))

Test1 posts a new topic. Test 2 and Test 3 receive notifications (as expected)

Test 1 posts a second new topic. No notification received by Test 2 and Test 3

Test 2 posts a new topic. Test 1 receives a notification, Test 3 does not.

Test 1 posts a new topic. Test 2 receives a notification, Test 3 does not.

At this point I made Test 4 also monitor the forum and continued the test

Test 2 posts a new topic. Test 1 and Test 4 receive a notification, Test 3 does not.

Test 1 posts a new topic. Test 2 receives a notification. Test 3 and Test 4 do not.

Test 3 posts a new topic. Test 1 receives a notification. Test 2 and Test 4 do not.

Finally...

Test 4 posts a new topic. Test 3 receives a notification, Test 1 and Test 2 do not.

Apologies for drawing this out, but this was important as the sequence is now fully predictable (and I tested this further predicting what would happen, which it did). Basically the first time that a user registers to watch a forum then that user will always receive a notification the next time that a new topic is posted. However they will NOT receive any further notifications until they post a new Topic themselves. The last user to post a new Topic is always the only user (apart from users who newly register to watch the forum) who receive a notification of the next new topic posted.

Something similar (I believe the same) is also then happening for notification of new posts within the topic, although i have not repeated the same structured tests on this as yet. Notifications of posting are, however, following a similar pattern and it is clear that not all users are getting notification of posts if they have signed up for this.

Hope this makes sense - I would appreciate if someone could log this formally for investigation and fix within the next release if you agree?

Huw

Thanks for your thorough investigation. It needs to be looked into as there does appear to be an issue. I'll do some testing this weekend.

Hi.

Just wondering if anyone had a chance to confirm whether this is an actual problem with the Beta (and I guess whether there is a simple fix - although I'm guessing not...) or whether I'm just doing something silly...

I was hoping to take our website (including an embedded YAF instance) live in the next week or so, so need to decide whether to roll back to an older version (other than this one issue I have not seen any major problems with the Beta that would have stopped me taking it live - however this one is a fairly important limitation).

Unfortunately, the reason I was trying the beta was due to the known bug with 1.9.5 related to problems with mismatched times between SQL and application servers. This appears fixed in the beta but was also a 'killer' problem for me going with 1.9.5 as our hosting company seems to be using a SQL server that likes to stay a few seconds ahead of the app server :-(

Sorry to chase - I appreciate that everyone is busy...

Regards

Huw