A couple of days ago, I discovered I had messages waiting when I was (I think) automatically logged out after being logged on for weeks. A big banner appeared on the page after login saying something like "2 Messages Waiting." But while I was logged on, and they were sitting there? Nothing. One of the messages was personal, and over a month old. The sender has heard nothing from me and who knows what she thinks!
I sent a test message to myself this morning to see if there was an alert or anything next to my name, or by "Messages," but saw no nothing. The message was in my box, but I'd never have known.
If there is a notice, it's inadequate. If there isn't, and this is the way this site has been programmed, it's something that should be remedied.
I have a few other suggestions I will post separately. TIA.
- Penn
Penn, yes, it is programmed weird, you can set yourself up to get an email to let you know you have a private message under
my profile, edit notifications.
Be aware that if you answer the email that it goes to the weavo admin and not to the person who sent you the private message. You have to go back into Weavo messages to answer a private message.
Thanks for your reply, Deb. I don't want yet more email, so I have disabled the contact function, which resolves the issue for me.
Penn, it looks like you can still get private messages (which I think is your issue). Look at the #2 message above, see the little person with the message bubble coming out of their mouth? That allows someone to click on it and send you a private message. Not sure if it disappears once you log out and log back in but it is still showing up. good luck Deb Mc
ps, if you look at this message you'll see I am set up for emails and for private messages.....two icons
I'll attempt to build on Deb's brief but excellent explanation on private message notifications. If any of the items below don't work for you, please let us know! Note that private message notifications are a different thing from other types of notifications (like forum or thread message notifications).
User-to-User contact and notifications
Private Message Notifications
All users can receive private messages on Weavolution.com.
- * When you receive a new message, on your next login to Weavolution.com you should receive a banner indicating that you have messages waiting. I've never tested what happens if you stay logged in all the time and you receive a message. It's possible we have a problem with that. I'll ask Claudia to test it with me next week. I don't really trust the results of a test with a PM sent to myself.
- * Optionally, you may receive an e-mail when you receive a private message on Weavolution. This is the default behavior, but can be toggled off or back on. As Deb explained, go to "My Profile" (in the orange box), select the Edit tab, and scroll toward the bottom of the page. Under Privatemsg e-mail notification, you can check or uncheck the box next to "Receive email notification for incoming private messages".
- * You can also go directly to your message box to review or write messages by clicking "Messages" (in the orange box). You can address a message to multiple recipients by putting commas between the names. If you pause while typing a name, a pop-up window should appear with matching options.
After changing hosts in April 2011, multi-person PMs were not working, but that should be resolved now.
You can also allow (or disallow) people to send e-mail to you directly. Through this method, the sender's address will be revealed to you, but they will not see yours unless you choose to reply.
- * In "My Profile" (in the orange box), select the Edit tab, look under the section Contact Settings and either check or uncheck "Personal contact form".
Again, anyone who is experiencing issues with the above options, please let us know. Also let us know if you are not getting thread notifications as well - I am actually testing something about those with this posting now.
If one stays logged in, one gets no notification that a private message has been sent UNLESS one is set up to get an email outside the weavo system.
Will your explanation get posted in the help section? It would be useful.
Thanks for confirming the issue Deb. Onto the list it goes.
I write explanations like the one above with the intent that they can be included in our FAQ / Help section. Also, FAQ / Help has emerged as one of the higher priorities in our immediate plans, so this is something we intend to address relatively soon.
At the same time, I recognize many people want an intuitive system, and don't like to read manuals - they want the system to work in a smart and obvious way. Over time, I think we can improve the site to approach that goal.
I have had the function: receive e-mail notofication checked for a long long time, but since last summer it has not worked for me. Just recently I had several occasions where I did not receive an e-mail when I had a new private message. It was only because this was a "conversation" I had started myself that I went and checked regularly to see if there was a reply that this worked at all. At other times I have found months-old messages lying there that I had not been aware of and felt awful for not answering the other person.
(I use Windows XP professional and Chrome)
Good morning Ellen,
Thanks for letting us know that your email notifications aren't working. We've seen some improvement since we moved hosts but clearly the issue hasn't been cleared completely!
Alison
We believe there are multiple issues affecting e-mail from Weavolution.com.
Claudia and I just conducted an experiment where she sent me a PM. I promptly received an e-mail notification that the PM had been sent to me. But I can't dispute accounts like Ellen's either.
It's possible that Ellen's ISP is rejecting e-mails from Weavolution. Or, all e-mails to certain users, including Ellen, might be jammed up in our system like paper stuck in a finicky printer. Both of these things are issues we're dealing with right now.
More detail:
- * We know multiple users with some specific e-mail providers (AT&T, BellSouth, and SBCGlobal) are not receiving e-mails of any kind. New users registering from these services are never getting their signup confirmation messages! We've put an inquiry into AT&T and haven't received a response... Our plan is to ask our hosting provider to investigate as they may have a bit more clout, and they should be the experts in this area.
- * Claudia has noticed that the notification subscription queue is unusually full, which suggests that messages aren't being sent or aren't being properly cleared out. I'm not sure why this queue would be so full, and yet I received my PM notification so quickly... I don't know if PM notifications go through the same queue. We've asked our development team to investigate this.
This is not a comprehensive list of problems, but it describes two big ones that might be "root causes" for other issues. I'll update here with progress on these items when I know more.
My problem is different in that I received an email saying I had a private message, but when I clicked on the link provided to read it on site and reply, I got "page not found".
cheers,
Laura
Just opened My Messages to reply to the one I received an email notice for today and found a bunch more I didn't know I had....
cheers,
Laura
I am pretty sure I have all the correct things check so I know when I get a message. Should I be getting a message when I post or start a thread and somone responds?
because I am not getting that.
I have been getting messages when I have a PM
Becky
Our hosting provider is investigating some of the e-mail notification issues now.
Update 11:20AM Pacific
We know that subscription notifications have been an ongoing issue since March. We were supposed to revisit the issue in April, but when we changed to a new hosting provider we expected that to solve the problem for good. It didn't...
Our hosting provider has recommended a fix to our developers, who say they have "run" the fix. Plus, all of the e-mails that were stuck in queue (about a week's worth) should have been pushed out this morning.
This should resolve at least some of the problems. We'll continue to monitor for additional "paper jams". And we still want to hear your reports of any continuing problems.
Hi everyone. We think the notification email problem may be (and I mean may be) solved. Please let us know if you just had a bunch of notifications come through or if you continue to have problems.
It was a configuration but no one has told us why it worked until about a week ago.
Thanks!
got nothing for this forum nor from a group posting that happened
Becky
So not happy to hear that. We'll let our developers know and see what else they can come up with.
Thanks Becky,
Alison
thanks.. its frustrating to have to back track to see if anyone posted on someting you either started or replied to
as a matter of fact I have checked on this thread to notify me and I did not get a notification that you had posted
Becky
Hi Becky. Yes, its is frustrating! Please know that we are working on it. We don't know what is causing it yet. Having thought that we had solved it, we're back to step one.
As always, we'll keep you posted. Not that you'll know...:-{
Alison
I tried opting out of PMs, but Deb noted that "it looks like you can still get private messages (which I think is your issue)..." and she is correct. However, I had DEselected that option when I posted, and just checked that it is STILL deselected. Yet the icon for "Send Private Message" is still there, and clicking on it yields the form.
Am I missing another way to opt out and block PMs here, or is this (below) the only one?
"Contact settings
Personal contact form
Allow other users to contact you by e-mail via your personal contact form. Note that while your e-mail address is not made public to other members of the community, privileged users such as site administrators are able to contact you even if you choose not to enable this feature."
TIA for any help. Drupal seems a little wobbly, unfortunately.
Hi Penn,
We'll check on this. I don't know the answer.
I don't know if Drupal itself is wobbly or if it is what we're trying to do with it. We certainly have had our issues. A huge number of sites run on Drupal - something like 1% of the web is Drupal-based, so it makes one wonder!
I had no idea of the company's presence on the web, that's amazing! I found out they were providing your services when Weavo was down and their parent site page was provided. I thought it was interesting that they made an enormous amount of administrative material available to anyone--normally, that stuff's locked down with at least one password. As I read the syntax goofs, I found myself thinking, sure hope Drupal's coders are better than their tech-support writers, or the Weavo folks are going to have a lot of problems. Anyway, hope things get straightened out without more hassle for you.
- Penn
Thanks Penn,
Pantheon is actually our host and not our coders. And yes, our coders are great! But our first coders were awful and they inherited a mess, so progress has been slow.
Thanks for the well wishes.
Alison
The comment about "DEselecting that option when I posted" leads me to believe there could be some confusion about what private messages are, and what the actual problem may be.
Private messages (PMs for short) are a secure way with which parties can communicate privately yet anonymously on Weavolution. PMs are kept on Weavolution.com and are not sent by e-mail. Neither the sender nor receiver can find out the other party's e-mail address. There is an e-mail notification option to tell you when you have PMs waiting, but this option still keeps all e-mail addresses private. There is no way to opt out of private messages on Weavolution.
The checkbox for "Notify me when new comments are posted" is not meant to affect private messages; I apologize if it is confusing in that way. That checkbox is meant to enable/disable e-mail notification for responses posted in discussion threads. Currently, that checkbox does not work as intended and is one of the lower priorities on our issues list.
Penn, in your profile settings, you have successfully turned off your direct e-mail contact option, which is a separate feature that allows other Weavo members to send e-mail directly to you. With the e-mail contact option, the person sending a message cannot see your address and must compose his or her message on a special form on our website. As a receiver of the e-mail, however, you would be informed of the sender's e-mail address, so that you may choose to reply directly without going through Weavolution. Replying directly then shares your address with the original sender; after replying to a received message, both parties can communicate directly through e-mail.
I'd like to identify your specific issue.
- * If you're receiving e-mail notifications when people respond to this thread and you can't turn it off, that wouldn't be a private message issue, but it is an issue and we'll try to get that turned off for you, and determine if any other users are having the same problem.
- * If you are being spammed through private messages, we'd like to know that so we can block the spammers.
- * If you just don't want anyone to be able to message you at all, I'm afraid we we don't have the ability to turn that off. Most forums I'm on do not have a way to disable receiving private messages, although I'm sure there are some out there that do. I could add that as a request to our issues list for future consideration.
- * If I haven't described the exact issue here, please do not hestitate to go into further detail.
Edit 16-May-2011: Clarified a few things from when I originally posted this in a hurry on Sunday morning.
I want to turn off receiving IM/PMs from people but cannot. Nor can I alert people to the fact that I won't be checking for them, so I won't be responding to them. Not that I expect to get many (especially not after this thread). And I have to say, my experience is counter from yours: most forums I have been on DO allow users to disable PMs entirely.
Without on-site alerts--the most appropriate and logical way to tell users they have an on-site message--and with emailed alerts not functioning perfectly (I had them on, they didn't work for the message I missed for a month), communications can be missed, which seems counter to the purpose of having a private communication system at all.
I think I've spoken my bit on this issue, which I'm resolving by behaving as if there are no PMs/IMs. It's not ideal, but it'll work for me! Good luck w/all the nits,
- Penn
Thanks for following up, with your careful and clear explanation Penn!
I will add the request to disable PMs entirely to our list of future possible enhancements to the site - along with the reliability problems that are contributing to dissatisfaction with the PMs in the first place.
