[Bug / Issue] Some users do not received notifications or emails from subscribed threads.

[svetlozar.draganov]

Hello all,

We are using vBulletin since forever. Few years back we updated it to version 5 and then some troubles started to appear.
Since our IT guys cannot pinpoint some of them I decided to ask vBulletin community for assistance.

One of the main issue we are having now is that some of the users do not receive notifications neither in the Messages tab top-right nor via email.
The bad news is that some of those problematic accounts are on our Support agents, is such case the agent doesn't get any notifications when the customer replied back, and there is no way for him to find out that someone actually replied to hist post.

We checked the notifications settings for working and non-working accounts in the Admin panel as well as in the User Settings > Notifications.
The settings are the same for both accounts but one of them receive notifications in the Messages tab and via email but the other one doesn't.

Is this a bug? Is there a way to troubleshoot it or fix it? How can we diagnose why some of the accounts receive notifications while other doesn't?

Any help will be much appreciated.

[Wayne Luke]

Are the users subscribed to the topics in question? (this can't be viewed in the AdminCP)

Are their email addresses accurate?

Are they active on the site when the reply is made? If so, they won't receive an email and should rely on the Notifications page of their message center.

What are their settings on their /account/notifications page? (This can't be viewed in the AdminCP)

[svetlozar.draganov]

It looks like one of the users actually wasn't subscribed for the topics - once subscribed it started to receive notifications.
I'll have this in mind for the next time when someone complains about it. Is there a global option to enable subscriptions for all users?

Another colleague in the company however complains that it receives the notifications too late, on average half day after the event.
Is there a way to make the notifications instant or at least within a few minutes?

[Wayne Luke]

You can set options on subscription for new registrations under Settings -> Options -> User Registration Options in the AdminCP. However, there is no option to set this retroactively.

You can make sure that your site isn't using Email Queuing under Settings -> Options -> Email Options

[svetlozar.draganov]

Thank you very much.
We did the suggested changes, hopefully our customers and support agents will have better experience with forum notifications now.

[svetlozar.draganov]

Hello again,

After working fine for almost 6 months, we got again complaints from users about not receiving notifications from the vBulletin Forum or receiving them with a huge delay of 24+ hours.

We haven't made any change to the system, so we have no idea what happened. Is there any chance to debug what's going on?

Best Regards,
Svetlozar Draganov