CUNY Academic Commons

Adding to this.

Forum post manually posted this morning: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/teaching-and-learning-center/forum/topic/announcements-from-the-teaching-and-learning-center/

I have not yet received an email. My settings for email are set to "all email"

To clarify:
1. The typical behavior is that you create a post at https://tlc.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/
2. a forum post is then created automatically from that post, in https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/teaching-and-learning-center/forum/
3. An email goes out to group members informing them of the new forum post

Yes, this is the process we have used in the past. There is a "group blog" setting in https://tlc.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/post-new.php that allows us to "send to group" When this is clicked, the the post was published on the site, it would also create a forum post with same title and content, which would be emails to all group members.

But what you actually saw was:
4. Created a new post https://tlc.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2025/01/29/tlc-panel-abolition-pedagogies/
5. No forum post was created in the group, therefore no email went out

Correct.

I'm having a hard time recalling a feature that will cause new blog posts to create group forum posts - do you have to configure something or click a button somewhere to make this happen?

Yes see screenshot attached.

Perhaps what you're referring to is that blog posts generally create an activity item in the group (ie at https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/teaching-and-learning-center/), which in turn triggers an email notification.

No, the usual behavour in the past was that a published post, with toggle "send to group" ON, would create a forum topic post, not just activity item.

Forum post manually posted this morning: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/teaching-and-learning-center/forum/topic/announcements-from-the-teaching-and-learning-center/
I have not yet received an email. My settings for email are set to "all email"

It sounds like this is a separate issue, and has to do with emails not being sent when you create a new forum post. Have you heard other reports of this? I'm looking at my email logs and it looks like 279 emails went out when this forum post was created, beginning at 2025-02-03 14:45:15 and ending at 2025-02-23 15:19:49. (times UTC, so subtract 5 for EST) I'm unsure why it took 35 minutes to send these emails out. I see one to your Gmail address at 15:19:22. Please check spam, etc.

I have checked spam etc and I have not received this email. But this may be a different issue? I should note there are 348 members in this group so is it possible that onle 279/348 members received the email of this forum post?

No, the usual behavour in the past was that a published post, with toggle "send to group" ON, would create a forum topic post, not just activity item.

Sorry, but I think you're mistaken. I've just looked through the codebase and I don't see any evidence that this is intended to happen. Perhaps you could point to a specific instance in the past where this has happened, either in the TLC group or elsewhere, so that I can do some reverse engineering. For previous context, see #10847, #11508, #11889.

I'll do some investigation to see if I can understand why posts to the TLC site are not triggering email notifications. Can you confirm that you always create posts using the Classic Editor on this site? It's possible that a change we made to accommodate the Block Editor caused an unintended regression when using the Classic Editor.

I have checked spam etc and I have not received this email. But this may be a different issue? I should note there are 348 members in this group so is it possible that onle 279/348 members received the email of this forum post?

I just checked subscription status for this site. Of the 348 members, only 278 are subscribed to get immediate notifications. The others get some sort of digests, or else have opted out of email notifications for the group. As regards your notification specifically, my log does indicate that the email was sent, which suggests that it's lost in the ether somewhere - maybe a legitimate issue, but not one on the Commons server. Are you able to verify with any other group members whether they received their expected emails for this particular notification?

Sorry, but I think you're mistaken. I've just looked through the codebase and I don't see any evidence that this is intended to happen.

sorry yes, i think what I meant was a site post creates an activity item, which sends an email. Which is what you suggested. This is not happening currently.

I'll do some investigation to see if I can understand why posts to the TLC site are not triggering email notifications. Can you confirm that you always create posts using the Classic Editor on this site? It's possible that a change we made to accommodate the Block Editor caused an unintended regression when using the Classic Editor.

Yes, we always use classic editor because this theme (Make) does not allow us to use block editor. Make is an old theme and the theme has a built in "page builder" which negates the use of block editor.

I just checked subscription status for this site. Of the 348 members, only 278 are subscribed to get immediate notifications. The others get some sort of digests, or else have opted out of email notifications for the group. As regards your notification specifically, my log does indicate that the email was sent, which suggests that it's lost in the ether somewhere - maybe a legitimate issue, but not one on the Commons server. Are you able to verify with any other group members whether they received their expected emails for this particular notification?

I'll try to verfy whether or not others in the group got the notification from the group via email this morning.

Tested the site post to group activity to email here

https://classtestbmcc.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2025/02/03/testing-title/

It did get posted to group to activity

https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/class-name-71994816/

I did not receive an email trough the Commons to the email address I have on file for my account (laurie.hurson@gmail.com) where I usually receive all commons group emails.

Concerning Forum post https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/teaching-and-learning-center/forum/topic/announcements-from-the-teaching-and-learning-center/

At least one other group member did not receive the email. the user is Sule Aksoy: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/suleaksoy/
Like me, she is also receiving Commons emails at a gmail account (not sure if that has anything to do with it)

I've opened #21980 to discuss missing emails, which seems to be an unrelated issue. I'll use this thread to investigate the creation of groupblog activity items.

Laurie, I've run a few tests using different configurations. The Make theme and the Classic editor don't seem to the culprits - activity items are created for new blog posts in my tests.

The next time you plan to create a new post on the TLC site, can you be in touch with me first? I would like to set up a few loggers that would help me to identify potential causes. When you know you have one coming up, maybe we could schedule the time in advance, so that I can turn on the logger just beforehand, and shut it off right afterward.

Hi Boone,

Thanks for this. Yes, I'll let Luke and TLC folks know you'd like to investigate this issue and we'll coordinate the next post with you.

Thanks!

I'm preparing to publish a post at tlc.commons.gc.cuny.edu.

Boone- would you like me to schedule it for a specific time? It can go out any time between now and late morning tomorrow.

Scratch that-- will post tomorrow morning, but can schedule a specific time if you'd like.

I've just set up the logging tools, which should be listening only to site 2425 (tlc.commons.gc.cuny.edu). Please let me know when you've published so that I can come back and check my logs.

Thanks for this data point. Do you generally schedule your posts for future publication?

We have, but not regularly. Usually they go right up.

I ask because the presence or lack thereof of the box could be what's causing the activity item not to be posted. If possible, it would be helpful if you could manually publish the post tomorrow morning rather than relying on the scheduled post. This way, if the activity item is created, we can have a pretty good idea that future-scheduling is the source of the problem. On the other hand, if the activity item is not created, we can probably be fairly certain that the problem lies elsewhere, and my logging tools will provide some information.

Got it. Will manually publish (but probably a bit earlier-- will ping you here when it's done).

As a test, I just scheduled a new blank post... the group blog box disappeared from view the screen when the page reloaded. Could very well be the issue.

And when I unscheduled the post, the box came back...

Just published...

activity item generated: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/teaching-and-learning-center/ (but I've not gotten an email)

Thanks for confirming. I can also see in my logging tools that activity creation took place as expected.

This suggests that scheduled-posting is in fact part of the problem. Laurie, do you recall whether, in previous problematic situations, you've posted via scheduled-posting?

I confirmed Luke's report that the 'Send to group' interface appeared only when initially writing the post. The original intent was to show it only for posts that hadn't yet been published, but the logic was too strict, and so certain instances of 'draft' or 'future' were not properly caught. I've fixed this in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/d5f157850f7bbc3c2b21d24184ff08f56e4b827e, which will be part of the next maintenance release.

I guess the next thing to test is whether scheduled posts on the TLC site do, in fact, create activity items. I'll leave my TLC-specific loggers in place, and perhaps you can let me know next time you plan to schedule a post.

(but I've not gotten an email)

Email issues are really completely separate, and we've focused thus far in this ticket on activity items. I guess here I'd ask (a) whether others in the group have received an email (sometimes you might not receive immediate notifications of your own posts), (b) whether you're subscribed to All Email or some form of digest, (c) whether you've recently received other emails related to activity in this group or any other group. From a general standpoint, I can say that there are no pending "immediate" emails for activity item 1065209, only a few digest-related events, which is expected behavior (if there were a broader problem, I would expect either nothing to appear for this activity item in the queue, or for many of the immediate items to be backed up). In any case, if this turns out to be an issue, perhaps we can run down the troubleshooting steps somewhere else, because it's likely to distract from the separate issue of activity item creation that this ticket was focused on.