CUNY Academic Commons

You mentioned in an earlier message that there seemed to be differences between different email addresses - you would receive emails as expected at one address, but not at another. Is that still the case? If so, how does that intersect with the report above?

A number of the items on the not-working list (upload group documents, new forum post, new group event) are powered by BPGES. It's likely that BPGES emails are not going to work as the server is currently configured. When you create a new activity item in a group, BPGES adds this item to a queue, and then launches an asynchronous request to trigger the batch-sending of notifications from the queue. This request uses wp_remote_get() with an endpoint of the form https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/admin-ajax.php... (part of the WP_Background_Processing library). This means that PHP tries to make a cURL request to https://commons.gc.cuny.edu. This is going to fail for two reasons: 1. commons.gc.cuny.edu points to the GC server (there's no custom hosts configuration, so the Reclaim server uses DNS records from public nameservers), and 2. even if it were pointed at the Reclaim dev site, the SSL cert is not configured properly, so the cURL request will likely fail. It would be nice if BPGES were a bit more resilient here, but I don't see an easy way to make it happen. I do think that it will just work as expected once we've switched over DNS, so I'd like to propose that we don't spend any more time testing or debugging BPGES-related emails.

I'm going to spend some time debugging other email types.

My earlier message was referencing an issue that I think was related to my Brooklyn College email address specifically, which more or less tracks because their email system has been unreliable for me in the past.

I ended up doing all of the testing for the above list with separate Commons accounts tied to my GC email and an ordinary Gmail account. Those same two accounts, tied to the same emails, on GC production deliver the emails that I noted not being able to receive on the Reclaim environment.

Thanks for the info about BPGES, Boone. I think it would be ok to hold off on testing those emails further, and be ready to test them right away post-migration to confirm everything is ok. Is it possible to generate a list of all BPGES emails that I could use as a checklist for that?

Is it possible to generate a list of all BPGES emails that I could use as a checklist for that?

Not easily. Basically, it's anything that creates an activity entry in the Activity tab of a group. New topic, topic reply, etc: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/test-group-1268270862/

Ok understood, I can do some post-migration testing based on that.

Emails from cac-onboarding (invitations to join the Commons, a site, or a group) are not working for the same reason as BPGES emails: they rely on WP_Background_Processing. They too should begin working when DNS is switched over.