Welcome Private Message stopped working mystery

[Bryanb]

I'm tearing my hair out on this one. For months, I had the Welcome Private Message enabled - new members were PMd from a moderator's account welcoming them to the forum with a list of posting rules etc. But today, after setting up a couple of dummy accounts, I realized it wasn't working.

I checked all PM settings and permissions, and everything is good to go - nothing that I can remember has been changed recently. I know this was working in October. Since then I've installed two plugins - but tonight I uninstalled both of them hoping that may have been the prob.

Still doesn't work. I even upgraded "users awaiting email verification" from 0 to 3 pms in their PM box.

What now? How can I trouble shoot this effectively?

[Jake Bunce]

Make sure PMs are enabled for the forum:

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Private Messaging Options -> Private Messaging Enabled

Make sure the appropriate groups have permission to use PMs (new people are put into Registered Users):

Admin CP -> Usergroups -> Usergroup Manager -> Edit Usergroup -> Maximum Stored Messages

Make sure the user has PMs enabled:

User CP -> Edit Options -> Enable Private Messaging

You can set the default preference for new users in your:

Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> User Registration Options -> Default Registration Options -> Receive Private Messages

[Bryanb]

That's the problem. I've double checked everything. Pms are working fine for the moderator's account, and everyone else's for that matter.

I even switched out the moderator's account name with mine in the field for "sender" of Welcome PM.

Nothing.

[Jake Bunce]

Hmm, we will probably need to take a look. Can you submit a trouble ticket with a URL and admin login to your forum?

http://members.vbulletin.com/members...ontactform.php

[Bryanb]

Thanks! Done.

[Bryanb]

Well, after submitting a trouble ticket (which Jake took care of promptly) there was nothing amiss and more puzzlement. The welcoming PM was still not working, so it was suggested to strip out the plugins, re-upload the original files and templates and trouble shoot it from there. That's some fun I could do without.

But yaaayy! I found out what the problem was before taking on that task:

The text was too long.

I tried a test PM using the text that I have for the welcoming PM and received this:

The text that you have entered is too long (3051 characters). Please shorten it to 3000 characters long.

So I upped the limit to 3500 and voila - it works now not a problem.

So if anyone has this same problem - check the text length before tearing your board apart

[Ozscot]

You just solved in two minutes what's been puzzling me for two months.

Thank you

Ozscot.

[Steve Machol]

The system should provide some sort of error or messages when the text is over the allowable limit. Please report this in the 3.6 Bug Tracker here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/project.php?projectid=6