Time delay in email notification -v- appearance of post referenced.

[#1]

I got a forum notification via email earlier and rather than click on the provided link I clicked my forum Toolbar button. But the message referenced in the email wasn’t visible and it was nearly 45 > 60 seconds before it appeared in my view of the forum? I have mentioned this before and IIRC there were mutterings about spam traps but this can't be right because if you click the link in the email you can see the message in the thread, so something is out of sync.

[#2]

Was the user new? There is a bug where a new user (who has not verified their email so the message would not appear to anyone) posting in threads and all subscribers to that thread would get an email notification with the content. When going to check the subscribed thread, the message did not appear there. The message would only appear after a user has verified their email address.

Or was this an already established user posting? There is also a case of messages getting caught by spam filters and there is a slight delay when this happens.

[#3]

@jaread83, in this instance the user was @Strat and what do you mean by "an already established user posting"? This can't be related to the spam filter as if you click the link in the email you get taken to the post, which means it has passed the spam filter. For the record even thought this happens all the time the post in question was this:

https://community.plus.net/t5/General-Chat/Grammar-Vigilante/m-p/1428561#M221691

[#4]

That's a bit odd behaviour. I have asked about this with Lithium before and a slight delay can occur sometimes. It's when the message was to never appear after a short time is when I was asked to let them know. Because it did appear after a little bit of time elapsed, I would probably get the same answer about the spam filter.

The reason I asked about whether it was an established member vs newly registered is because email notification are sent when a new user posts on a subscribed topic without verifying their email, subscribers get the post content via email but the message would not appear until they have verified (this is something currently being looked into).

If you are noticing this regularly, please provide me with some screenshots and timestamps of everything so I can go to Lithium with the information so they can pinpoint what the exact issue is.

[#5]

I have just checked the forums for updates and I had this :

But no email this time!

[#6]

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@jaread83 wrote:

If you are noticing this regularly, please provide me with some screenshots and timestamps of everything so I can go to Lithium with the information so they can pinpoint what the exact issue is.

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This happens to me all the time. I got a notification email this morning:

I then went direct to the web site using my toolbar URL but this:

didn't appear until 09:18, and my clock is synced via an NTP daemon so should be correct.

[#7]

The time on your first screenshot says the email was sent at 9:15 and the post in question was also created at 9:15.

Not sure why your email would then receive the email at 9:18 as the email was sent at 9:15 according to your screenshot.

[#8]

@jaread83 - You appear to have mis-read the post.

[#9]

apologies... so am I right in thinking that the post itself didn't materialise (in your unread feed) until a few minutes later?

[#10]

@jaread83, that's exactly it, but the time stamps tell another tale. If you simply go by these then all is well but I can assure you that the post didn't appear in the listing until later but how I can prove that I don't know as the time stamps cannot be relied on.

If you can make a note of the URL I use to view the site then reply to this post I will mention you in my next reply. When you get that notification via email can you then use the URL to see if my reply is visible in the view, and if not how long it takes to appear please.

[#11]

I have sent an email over to Lithium support to ask whats going on with this. Its a bit odd that the post would not appear until a few minutes later.. especially if you are a particularly active user that uses the email links and the feeds as things are happening.

I will post here about findings when I am told whats going on.

[#12]

Thanks @jaread83. Posted at 11:07:00

[#13]

The community was restarted in the early hours of this morning and I have been told by Lithium support that this should resolve this issue (community had not been restarted in a while). I am erring on the side of caution so please flag this up with me as soon as it happens again and I will tell go back to Lithium to find another solution.

[#14]

@jaread83 it may be just me but the forum is loading slower than usual ?

[#15]

I haven't noticed any decrease in the time to load pages or any pages failing to load this morning.

I will have a look around and see if any pages are especially slow and see if there are any resources hanging in my web dev tools.

edit: worth noting that after a restart some assets would gain a new reference forcing the browser to redownload them (due to a change and having cached files conflict with any changes). That might cause the slow down at first.