BuddyPress.org

@shanebp – Wouldn’t your suggestion just turn off notification altogether? I don’t want to do that – I just want to stop members getting notifications of @mentions from years ago (or, prior to the import at least).

Is there any way to purge notifications emails for mentions made before a certain date from the database? For the past few days, my server has been sending out hundreds of these notification emails with activity mentions that took place years ago. As a result, I’m getting a lot of (warranted) grief.

I very much doubt my install has been compromised. In fact, searching through the buddypress support forum it seems this is an issue that crops up after imports – so I believe there is probably something in the core code doing this.

A couple of examples:

https://buddypress.org/support/topic/post-migration-constant-user-email-notifications-for-mentions/ @zane

https://buddypress.org/support/topic/mass-notifications-of-old-mentions/ @halo-diehard

Disabling my mail server is not a practical solution. For now I will just have to block all email notifications for mentions until (hopefully) a solution is found.

Pssst @netweb – are you still around?

I used the bbpress importer for phpBB:

phpBB

The script only runs once and after everything is imported it is not used.

OK, just so we’re on the same page I’ll give the URIs as I respond.

Having looked into my notifications feed here:

/members/member-name/notifications/

I see that notifications were indeed coming in in ‘batches’, too.

For example:

All refer to pre-import mentions.

HOWEVER, no notifications for pre-import activity appear there from the time I ran the below mySQL query yesterday:

UPDATE bp_notifications SET is_new=0 WHERE is_new=1

So that seems to have had some effect (yet emails continued to go out).

As for activity entries being created, if I go to:

/members/member-name/activity/

… it contains all activity from the start of time (post-import and pre-import activity).

bbpress told me this is a buddypress issue since buddypress generates the @mention email notifications.

A couple of hours ago I added this to my functions.php file:

//buddypress stop mention emails //
remove_action( 'bp_activity_sent_mention_email', 'bp_activity_at_message_notification', 10, 5 );
//End buddypress stop mention emails //

Hopefully that will stop new emails from going out. Not the ideal solution, though as it also blocks mentions for anything post-import, too (I believe).

bp_notifications is still generating notifications on pre-import mentions.

When I sort bp_notifications by date_notified I see:

When I reference the item_id back to the bp_activity table, the IDs for date_notified as you can see in the screenshot above relate to very old pre-import activity.

When I sort bp_notifications by item_id I see:

You can see from the above screenshot all the pre-import mention notifications going out (look at the jump in item_id between forums and activity).

Post-import new reply notifications are working fine.

A response from my host:

Nope; there’s no background processes. If there were, I’d expect to be seeing a lot higher rate of messages – they seem to more or less be coming out every time a page is loaded (some people refer to the behaviour as “poor man’s cron”)

How do I disable the importer script? I used the official bbpress importer script found in:

Wp-Admin>Tools>Forums>Import Forums

As far as I know, once it’s done importing then it’s done importing.