Glitches on the forums - please read

[Sapphire]

Hi everyone,

It's been brought to my attention that there are some pretty bad glitches with outgoing mail from these forums. As a result, members are not receiving notifications when a thread topic is replied to, notifications when there are PMs or even notifications that their account registration has been approved. This has also affected the admins, meaning we don't get emailed (like we're supposed to) by the forums when someone new signs up or tries to contact us through admin@bwint.net to query something. As a result, some new members are struggling to get in and some older members who've lost passwords etc. are struggling to let us know.

In order to get to the bottom of this, I need to figure out what is at fault. I have emailed the site's webhost a few times and each time I get told to do this or that to fix the problem, nothing of which works. Their latest theory is that our severs are fine (and they mailed me some tests they did to prove it) and that the email clients (such as Yahoo) are at fault for over-filtering. Meaning, you MAY be getting notifications but it's either going straight to your spam folder or not getting through at all.

I need to do a forum-wide survey to figure out what's happening. Please could you fill out the following questionnaire and let me know how this is affecting you. The more info we have the better equipped we are to solve the problem. I'd appreciate the questionnaire being filled out as well as the poll I am including, but if you're pressed for time the poll will suffice.

1.) Do you receive any emails from the forums, such as notifications, in your inbox? Y/N
2.) Do you receive any emails from the forums, such as notifications, in your spam folder? Y/N
3.) Which email client do you use? (e.g. Yahoo, Gmail etc.)
4.) Have you ever received any notifications from the forums and if so, when was the last time you remember receiving one?


Those are the key questions. If you want to offer any more information, please feel free. Every bit of info helps in this regard.

Thanks for your patience!!

[Aesir]

I use Hotmail

[Starath]

1.) No
2.) No
3.) Gmail
4.) The last time I received a notification from BWint, it was sometime this summer (June, I think)

It should be noted that I suspect the reasons why I answered "No" to the first two questions is because of something else other than the bigger issue at hand. I log into the forums frequently to make sure there isn't a new PM sitting here that I wasn't notified of. Aside from PMs, I don't get notified of anything else because of my personal settings.

Hope that helps you Sapph.

[/EDIT]

I just thought of something else. I haven't gotten an notifications from the forum cuz, well.... I haven't gotten any PMs since the one back in June. So, those of you who do send PMs: Do you guys get notifications via email before you log in here at the forums? We have to take into account that anyone who answers "No" to question #1 might not have received any PMs/updates/ect. in the first place.

[Blazemane]

1.) Yes
2.) Yes
But I've been noticing that, whether the messages I do get go to my inbox or my spam folder (which I've explicitly set not to automatically delete messages except if they've been there 30 days), I have been receiving them less reliably as of late. I'll get some emails telling me I have a new private message as soon as I have one, I'll get some of those emails days later than they should come, and lately, I've gotten private messages and not been notified at all. I'm pretty sure my most recent private message did not trigger any notification, so it's possible that notifications have stopped entirely for me now.
3.) Yahoo
4.) June 13, 2010 is the date that the last one I can find got emailed to me, but I feel like I got one around October 11, and simply can't find it because I forgot to take it out of the spam folder and it's been 30 days since then. But again, I do know that I haven't been getting emails for some of my most recent notifications.

[Sapphire]

Hey again everyone. Just posting to ask if any of you have seen any improvements in this regard? A few days ago I changed some settings in the admin CP to forward forum messages through a Gmail account. It seems to have worked for me but I did have to unblock the email from my spam folder. Once I did that I started to receive notifications again and hopefully you will too. I would really appreciate it if members could give me feedback on this issue so I can monitor the progress we're making. Thanks.

[Blazemane]

I know this is a while later, but I have my account set to send me email notifications when I get private messages. I have, within this week, been getting private messages, but haven't been getting any emails about them.

[Sapphire]

Thanks for the update Blazemane. Have you checked that the email address from which the forums sends notifications (bwintforum*at*gmail.com) isn't blocked by your Yahoo spam filter? It was on mine. I simply unblocked it and now I am receiving emails about topic replies, PMs etc. The original problem was that the forum's host wasn't reliably sending messages, but having switched to gmail it seems more consistent. but it also appears a lot of people's email clients are putting the messages into spam or blocking them altogether, so you may have to check that first. If you still cannot receive any messages after that, please let me know.

[Blazemane]

I've never established any filters (and my account says I'm not using any), but some messages do automatically get sent to my spam folder. I have, however, set my account so messages don't get deleted in the spam folder until a month later, and I always look at new messages in the spam folder. So things should get to me unless I'm misunderstanding something.

[Nurann]

Just a reminder to everyone; in order to circumvent this glitch, we the admins have to check through each and every new registration manually and then send out our own verification email. As we get a few dozen spambots every couple of days, it takes time to sort through and find the legit registrations. Your registration may even get missed or accidentally deleted if it has even a vague resemblance to one a spambot has used. In order to speed up your registration, please email "bwintforum@gmail.com" with your account name. That way it's easier for us to single it out in the mess and activate you sooner!