Looking Ahead

Now that monumental work (that takes ages to release) is out of the way, things should fall back into a more regular and familiar pace. Nevertheless, even more great stuff is coming your way, as we have some ambitious plans for the short and long term futures. Watch this space for announcements and dev reports, since the next year and a half are shaping up to be quite exciting. Here’s why:

– Admin Panel Improvement;
– Content Management System Introduction;
– Default Theme Reimagining;
– Mobile Version Enhancement;
– User Interface Facelift;

There’s likely more stuff, and that’s quite a full plate, isn’t it? Still, our team is always excited and passionate about continuously improving the product, but only if the changes are consistent, healthy and gradually introduced.

Well, ‘till next time, when we’ll take a more detailed look at some of the things in our plan. In the meantime, subscribe to our updates on this blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ to never miss an announcement.

Cheers,
Oxwall Foundation Team

The issue still exists with the mail notifications bug. According to this forum a fix has not been published and this has been going on since December 2014. This is now Mid-January. Can we please get an update from the developers on the status of the fix for this plug-in. I have over 500 users that overload our support system with reports regarding this feature not working. I could really use a permanent fix for this issue because it is a pain running sql queries manually every day. Thanks in advance for the devs prompt response to this issue.

thank you

Please be patient, our developers are working on the issue, the fix or update of the plugin will be provided soon. 

http://www.oxwall.org/store/item/688

Here is my best guess on why this plugin has yet to be updated...

First and foremost, Oxwall is an open source software.  This means that contributions made by the community helps oxwall grow - those who complain over an issue for an extended period of time do not help.  If you did any reading in this thread, you will note that there IS a fix to the issues you are encountering for this plugin.

http://www.oxwall.org/forum/topic/29195?page=3#post-127021 - (Broken down version)

http://www.oxwall.org/forum/topic/29195?page=4#post-128274 - (May be complicated for some users if you do not know what you are doing)

Sure, this means that you yourself have to take responsibility in fixing the issue, but that is pretty much what you signed for when using open source software.

Secondly, since this messages plugin is FREE, it too is considered open source.  And since I have been an oxwall user for quite sometime now, I can attest that some issues cannot be fixed by the devs as they are unable to replicate and/or reproduce the issue.

Thirdly, when there is an update to the actual platform, that's when these freebies get updated as well, (e.g.: messages plugin, blogs, groups, events, etc.) - essentially all the FREE plugins that come with the platform.  In total I think there are 19 plugins that come with the platform.

So, if you do not want to take matters in your own hands and trust the community for help.  Please be patient.

To re-iterate:

1. Oxwall is open source, this includes the messages plugin.

2. Read the entire thread - there are actually 2 solutions to this issue (both do the same thing, 1 way is broken down for you, the other way is/or may be a bit more complicated for you if you do not know what you are doing. However, both accomplish the same result - a fix).

3. If you do not want to take matters in your own hands, please be patient. I'm sure this plugin will need to be updated once a new version of oxwall comes out (this may still be awhile, so you may need to resort to #2).

Your "fix" actually isn't a fix at all. I followed your "fix" (took me hours), and yes, for a short time there were no unread messages. However, they are starting to tick up again. So the issue is inherently with the Messages plugin, and changing values in the DB is only a temporary workaround at best.

Quote from ross Guys, this is a bug and we passed to our developers. It will be fixed asap

Not sure what to tell you then - perhaps it is a third-party plugin that is causing this to continue for you.  I haven't had any issues with this since I figured out how to fix it using what I posted as a "temp fix" for the community until the devs of this plugin release an update and that was almost 2 months ago.  So I'd say in my case, it was a permanent solution.

inside83's short version does exactly what my long version fix does. So if you are knowledgeable with php and mysql, you can give his solution a try.  It does the exact same thing - just minus the labor on your part of having to go through the entire table in your database as the query runs automatically.

Or as Steven has suggested, you could build yourself a php script to access your mysql database and use a cron job to execute every 12 hours (or sooner) - however, you will have to either ask him here -or- PM him on how he accomplished that.  His version would be the middle version of the 2 already suggested.

Either way, these solutions have helped many others and they all work as a perm solution for the time being.

The only reason why it wouldn't work in your case (or at least that I can think of) is that you have other third-party plugins that may be affecting it.  It's unlikely but probable.  Before you go disabling plugins though, I'd suggest trying all the solutions posted by the community (in total there are 3 now) - all of which do the exact same thing - however, they progress depending on your time and availability (e.g., short version is the quickest, middle version will take more time, and the long version may take you the longest depending on the size of your websites community).

And like I've mentioned before - the devs (from my experience) rarely check these forums since they have their own "private forums" for their plugin/theme.  Oxwall does have a team of customer support though that checks these forums and relays the information to the devs.  And as Ross has pointed out many times, the devs are aware of this - so please be patient.  And since this message plugin is part of the overall oxwall software, it is highly unlikely that an update will come anytime soon.  We will more than likely see it updated when the main platform is updated.  So if you do not want to wait any longer, try all 3 solutions already posted - if it's still causing you issues, it may be a third-party plugin causing you these issues to continue, or as a matter of fact, could potentially be other variables at play that is causing this issue to continue for you.

If the 3 solutions did not work for you - post any relevant information such as error logs, etc. rather than saying these solutions did not work for you.  The community can't help if we don't know why things are not working right on your end - especially since the solutions worked and are continuing to work for so many others.

Cheers,

Hybrid

@Hybrid - thanks for the in-depth reply buddy. Reading my comment back, I didn't mean for it to come across as rude as it did. So apologies for that.

I've spent so much time on this issue with my dev site, it's very frustrating. I've been through and disabled all plugins (apart from Oxwall core), and systematically re-enabled them, but the problem still persists. There's nothing in the logs to share, literally, the only thing I can see/find are these phantom unread messages. Like I say - very frustrating.

Oxwall is FOSS, and that does need to be taken into consideration. But I think people's frustrations sometimes get the better of them, unfortunately. I'm not a PHP developer, so although I'd love to help fix the problem, my skills don't allow me too.

Anyway, hopefully Steven will share his script and a cron will draw a line under this one. :-)

Kev

My script is working very well. My support staff continue to test the system 4 times a day to ensure it is working. The only inconvenience in using my script is it resets every users messages notifications, weather user has read them or not. The good news is it does not delete the messages so i advise my users, with the help of our support team, to check the all messages folder for new entries they haven't seen.

It is a very good fix compared to some of the other methods i have seen here.

I must profess the idea of using a php script with cron came from a brain storming session our support dept had and my Head of Network Security came up with the idea from his previous experience of knowing you could do sql queries via php. So he was tasked with writing the script, so he did, and we implemented it a week ago and it has been preforming wonderfully as an alternative option. 

i AM POSTING OUR SCRIPT BELOW AND HOPEFULLY IT WILL HELP Y'ALL UNTIL A PERMANENTSOLUTION IS REACHED WITH THE DEVELOPERS.

This is just a temporary fix and our solution to the problem. I think we all would like the official fix but as this is FOSS sometimes that can take some time for the devs to correct. In talking with my technical support team I have learned that because this is a default plug-in, a true work around  solution would be to purchase a third party mail/messaging plug-in from the premium section of the oxwall store. This would fix the issue more permanently and you won't have to wait for a fix of the free plug-in. Also, third party plug-in devs also offer much faster plug-in fixes than the default plug-ins do. Just a thgought if you don't want to wait for the fix of the free one. We are planning to purchase the Mail Pro plug-in fron the dev "Aron". But, the ultimate decision is based on the preference for your own community. Just because something works for one community doesn't mean it is a one size fits all solution. Do what is best for your own community but we will continue to donate our experiences to the oxwall community to provide others options and encouragement to contimue to develop this great software.

Thanks,

Steven

Social Reconnection Community