‘Send as a Single Thread’ field problem….

[j9boulder]

Well we just found out the hard way the great danger of using the ‘Send as a Single Thread’ setting with the MASS MESSAGING feature. Our test only involved 55 users, but every time a user responded, their response went to everyone.

This slowed down our site to the point of crippling it, and each user had almost 100 Messages in their inbox – with the great delay, some people pushed the SEND button multiple times, so everyone got multiple Replies. The email continue to come 2 days later as people continue to respond to this…

I cannot think of a time when we would ever want to use this Setting. Could you please tell me how to hide this setting for the MASS MESSAGiNG feature?

Where is the documentation for the MASS MESSAGING feature? It would really be helpful if you could include a brief ‘tooltip’ for each setting when one move’s our cursor over a field. I had no way of knowing the ‘Send as a Single Thread’ setting would cause so many problems.

Thanks much!!

[ElbowRobo]

Hi, the ability to disable this functionality already exists in the system. Please goto Settings > Mass Messaging > Messaging and disable “Allow users to send messages as single thread.”

I am sorry to hear it has caused issues for your site but the replying problems are nothing to do with the plugin and perhaps it might be worthwhile writing a little bit of JavaScript to disable the button after pressing it once. This feature mimics the in-built functionality of composing a single message to a few people, which acts like a group chat.

Please let me know if you are having problems finding this setting.

[ElbowRobo]

Also, there is some documentation on the project homepage. https://wordpress.org/plugins/mass-messaging-in-buddypress/ See the FAQ section.

[j9boulder]

Great – thank you ElboRobo! I should have looked in the Settings first…

I did ready that FAQ in the Documentation page, but it does not warn one that all the replies to the Mass Message will be seen by Everyone – I am still getting responses to the Mass Message test I sent out on Saturday…

What does “Send as single thread?” mean?
With this ticked, a single message will be sent with everyone as a recipient.
With this un-ticked, each member will receive an individual message from you.

[j9boulder]

One more question – today we did another Beta test of our WordPress site and even though we had the ‘Send as single stream’ field hidden, we still saw users responding to this Message, and once again it brought our server to a halt.

I was asked to go into my Message account and delete the Mass Message so it would not continue to slow things down.

But once we send out a Mass Message, I thought it was too late to delete anything. Is this true? Or would it of helped to go into my Message box and delete all Sent email with this subject, and/or go into my Inbox and delete all Message with this subject?

Thanks for the clarification.

[ElbowRobo]

This plugin simply acts as a user interface to sending the messages. Everything else (including replying) is handled by BuddyPress. I am not 100% sure, but I believe deleting a message only deletes it for you, and remains for other users.

With this in mind, my advice is to connect to your database and navigate to the bp_messages_messages table to find the message. Once you have found it, take a note of the thread_id and then run the following SQL (substituting :thread_id with the actual ID).

UPDATE bp_messages_recipients SET is_deleted = 1 WHERE thread_id = :thread_id

Depending on your schema this table might be named slightly different. This way the message will still exist in the database but will be inaccessible to everyone. I hope this helps.