Hi oekoplatt,
Sorry you’re running into problems. I’m afraid I honestly have no way of knowing how long it would take to send a notification to n subscribers as it depends highly on your hosting/server situation.
You have identified a valid issue, which I will address in the next release of Post Notif, in that there is presently no way to cancel an in-process notification process. In the meantime, de-activating and re-activating the plugin should effectively cancel out the hung process or you can go into the database directly, into the WP core “options” table and delete the following options, substituting the specific post’s literal ID in for “[POST ID]”:
post_notif_count_to_send_post_id_[POST ID]
post_notif_count_sent_post_id_[POST ID]
After doing this, you may want to try scheduling future post notifications, so that they are sent in the background; it’d be interesting to see if this gets you better results.
Thanks,
Devon
Hi Devon ,
unfortunately I have no access to the database. And because I was afraid to lost some configuration de-activating and re-activating the plugin I looked for another way. So first I made a new post and tried to send the notifification automatically. It works and dosn’t block further notifications!
However
* in the not fully notified post remains the entry “Eine Benachrichtigung für diesen Beitrag ist bereits in Arbeit. Bitte schau später noch einmal vorbei.” (“Post notif for this post is already IN PROCESS. Please check back later.”)
* In “View Post Notifs Sent” there are only manually sent test-notifs and no entry about the sucessfully sent notification.
* And in the sucessfully sent post there is also the entry “Post notif for this post is already IN PROCESS. Please check back later.” This is very confusing.
In Your next release of Post Notif a way to cancel an in-process notification process would be good. But in my case it dosn’t help: I don’t know who received the notification and who didn’t. If only 5% didn’t receive and I resend to all, 95% will be annoyed, because they receive the notification twice. So I have to ignore this post.
For next release I’ve a wish: In the section “Manage Subscribers” a possibility to edit the categories of the subscribers.
The background is following: First I wanted to notify about “all” categories, but later added a new category which is excluded. The earlier imported subscribers have “all” and I want to delete the new category for them.
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This reply was modified 9 years, 4 months ago by
oekoplatt.
Hi oekoplatt,
I do appreciate you continuing to work at a solution to this predicament. The messages you continue to receive, due to hung up notification processes (not to mention having to jump through hoops to re-send the notifications themselves!), are annoying and I apologize for that. I will add the ability to cancel a notification process to the next version of Post Notif.
I am afraid there is really nothing I can do within the plugin to (reliably) track who received a notification; the code that tracks who was SENT a notification could be bolstered, however.
Further, I will certainly mull over your request for admin editability of subscribers’ categories. In the meantime, a workaround might be to export your subscribers to file, delete them from the system, modify the exported subscriber data file (to specify only the reduced set of categories you wish for them to receive), and then re-import them from file. Obviously, PLEASE backup everything before you attempt this as I’d hate for some fluke to leave you with no subscriber data! 🙁
If this is too onerous, I would not blame you for looking at other post notification plugins to see if they handle your situation better than (the current version of) Post Notif does.
Thanks,
Devon
Hi Devon,
in fact meanwhile I looked for another plugin, but nothing meets my requirements (too complex, no possibility that users can define categories, they subscribe and so on).
So I exported users, edited categories an wanted to re-import. But there is another problem: I get an error: “Import error Invalid category (1)”.
But: the category 1 exists and belongs to some subscribers. For example export record is: “web@oekologische-plattform.de,,1,4,5,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,26,28,82,181,218,665,807,974,1164,1569,1619,1679”.
Of curse I can ignore this category, because it is for universal purpose. This means posts, which do not fit more detailed cats, but this can not the solution.
Have You any idea?
Thank You very much
Hi oekoplatt,
I am sorry to hear you’ve not been able to find a plugin that fully suits your post notification needs and, further, that my suggested workaround, for you to continue using Post Notif, is generating errors in the (re-)import process.
You’ve identified another previously undetected issue with the plugin! The import subscriber code deliberately omits category 1 (which is WP core assigned to “Uncategorized”), because when I originally wrote the import functionality, there was not a way for admins to choose the subset of categories they wished to expose to their subscribers, so I decided that it would be prudent to omit “Uncategorized” posts for them (and therefore made no sense to allow subscribers to be imported subscribed to category “1”). When I added (in v1.0.5) functionality to the options page so admins could define the set of categories from which subscriber can choose, I did not change the import code accordingly.
I am sorry I missed this, and will add it to the bugs I will fix in the next version of Post Notif (that I FINALLY have some time to work on in the coming weeks).
I hope you can get things to work well enough for you, in the interim, and thank you for bringing this issue to light; I do appreciate it and will get it fixed.
Thanks,
Devon
Hi Devon,
thank You for information. Glad to hear, that You will fix category 1-problem.
Meanwhile I found the reason for my first problem (“Post notif for this post is already IN PROCESS. Please check back later.”):
Allowed time to execute script on my server is 300 sec. Using the plugin “WP E-Mail Debug” on the server I found, that about 230 notifications were sent and than progress bar stopped.
In a local installation I found that “post notif” requires about 10 min to send all 450 notifications. Obviously “post notif” is interrupted by the server after 300sec.
As “post notif” isn’t finished regularly the options
post_notif_count_to_send_post_id_[POST ID]
post_notif_count_sent_post_id_[POST ID]
remain not deleted. To delete them manually dosn’t help, because next time script will be interrupted again.
I see only one solution:
The old plugin “post notification” had a possibility to determine how much notifications should be send in one portion. And this repeated until all notifications are sent. Other newsletter-plugins have similar approach. It would be great, if You could add this also. I think, other users would be glad also.
Thank You
Hi oekoplatt,
Thank you for being so patient as well as continuing to provide additional info about your situation.
At long last, I will be working on the next version of Post Notif this weekend, and adding something similar to the “batching” of notifications that Post Notification had (and others still have), is in my plans. If you’re willing and able to help test this, I’d love to send you a pre-release version when I have one ready.
Thanks,
Devon
Hi Devon,
I enjoy testing next (pre-) release.
Hi oekoplatt,
When you have a chance, would you please send me your email address (my email address is my first name at devonostendorf dot com), so I have it when I’m ready to send you some code to test?
Thanks,
Devon
Hi oekoplatt,
Thanks for your help with testing Post Notif 1.1.3. I hope you’ll be willing to do some additional testing of 1.1.4, specifically in the area of batching.
Thanks,
Devon
Hi Devon,
Yes, of course. I’m waiting the 1.1.4.
Hi oekoplatt,
As I look at how long this thread has been open, I am embarrassed that it has taken this long to address your initial concern about canceling post notification sends (and general deliverability improvement via configuration). Though it has been bumped from several versions at this point, I have drawn a hard line as far as including it in version 1.2.0 (here’s the link to the schedule: https://devonostendorf.com/projects/post-notif-1-2-0).
I am going to mark this thread as resolved but you can feel free to open a new one, with justified frustration about the delay 🙂 if I don’t ship it in 1.2.0!
I truly do appreciate your patience as well as your willingness to test and report feedback, as you’ve helped me considerably with other issues in the past months!
Thank you,
Devon
