Geeklog Forums

I have installed and configured Geeklog for a colleague who has throat cancer and lots of his friends are supporting him through Geeklog. It's brilliant, and he's very pleased with it!

I have email working via SMTP (recently changes as some emails filtered as spam), so checking if this is better. But working OK. Any stories contributed and new users etc, notification emails are being set to the admin email OK. Emailing a user also works OK. I have four topics set up and working OK.

However, users that select to receive notification of new stories posted to these Topics do not receive notification.

Have checked the config.php file which shows:

Is there something else I need to set up? I'm not sure what cron and the use of php as a shell script means.

I have searched the threads here but can't find this specific problem so I'm really sorry if this duplicates... Can anyone help point me in the right directions please?

Thanks
MartinR

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MartinR

A cronjob is an external process (running on the webserver) that can kick off scripts (for example) at a given time. Ask your hosting service if they offer that.

Alternatively, I wrote a plugin that lets you kick off the Daily Digest manually (hence called "Manual Digest" plugin). See the FAQ for details: How do I set up the Daily Digest?

bye, Dirk

Excellent, many thanks Dirk. Aparently I have the use of cron so I will try this first.

I suppose the confusion for me was that the administrator (site email) can receive notification, and I assumed users would too. Ah, the power of assumption!

If I have to use the plugin, I note this comes in a tar file. I seem to remember reading somewhere about not using WinZip to unpack this (I'll ftp the files to the server) - but can't find the reference to this.

Can you recommend software to safetly unpack the files on a Windows PC for upload to the server

Many thanks for a comprehensive answer and the link to the explanation of crontab.

MartinR

Cron is supplied by my ISP via a control panel which makes it easy to set up (drop-down selection for times & dates etc), but despite setting the correct file permission (chmod 755) and path to the file, I received error messages.

Then I checked the path statement in emailgeeklogstories. For my server this was incorrect, so I changed #!/usr/local/bin/php -q to #!/usr/local/bin/php -q, checked the file permissions again and set the task to run.

It worked - sort of. The admin email received the daily digest. Some users (me included) who have set this in their preferences, did not receive the notification. I have checked spam filters etc (server and client logs), not in a black hole anywhere. If I manually send an email to logged-in users, it is received by them all. So why not notification? This is wierd.

Any further ideas?

Thanks...

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MartinR

We've never been able to pin down the exact versions or configurations of WinZip that are causing problems - for some it works, for some it doesn't (read: produces corrupted files). So as not to cause too much confusion for novice users, we're simply recommending to use something else.

There are lots of free and non-free alternatives, like 7-Zip and WinRar. Try one of those.

bye, Dirk

How many stories were in that first email? I should have mentioned that the Daily Digest may run into timeouts, i.e. limitiations your webserver has for the max. execution time of a script. That may happen if you have a lot of recipients or a lot of stories to send.

The exact limits depend on the server configuration or course. I'd say it should be able to send a few stories per day to about 50-100 users from most shared hosting configurations.

The technical background is that it has to check for each user if they actually have access to the stories that are to be included in the email. So it's creating an individual email for every recipient. That's obviously not something that's suited for mass mailings ...

bye, Dirk

There were 16 stories in the first Daily Digest, the email carried the full text of stories (email file size about 44k), which was sent to about 80 users.

What alerted me to the problem was a user that had set up an incorrect email address, the digest was returned to me as undeliverable, but there was the Daily Digest message. Searching other email accounts at both PC and server level for filtering etc, revealed nothing. I couldn't understand why some had the message sent, others not. I had reset the time of the cron task to run 2 or 3 times to check it. I finally gave up and left the job to run at 2:30 this morning, after setting the config.php to restrict the message to the subject heading only.

This morning all the emails came flooding in! So as you suggest, maybe the server timed out. But at least it seems to have settled down. I think we can say it is working now!

I have a few 'niggles' with the software (for example I'd like to change some of the messages generated) but it is generally working very well and my colleague is very happy with it. It means a lot to him, to have his friends support him during his Chemotherapy and Radiotherapy treatment, there will be times when he can't talk (that's real suffering!) so his blog will be a lifeline to keep everyone updated and to save his energy by not dealing with loads of emails and phone calls. He thinks Geeklog is brilliant! I agree.

Very many thanks for your help Dirk!

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MartinR