Hi there,
I’ve had an issue where email subscribers to my blog aren’t receiving emails about my new posts. I’m a Pro user and I have emails enabled so I’m curious as to what the issue might be.
Thanks
Hi, could you share your username / blog with us, either here or privately @support? Then we can take a look into this.
My blog is Kool-Aid with Karan.
Thanks
Thanks. And just to help us debug, how are you finding that emails aren’t getting sent to subscribers? Have you subscribed to your blog yourself? And has everyone checked their Spam folder for the emails?
I am subscribed to my own blog and know several of my subscribers personally. Neither myself nor those I know who are subscribed have received a single post email dating back to last summer. We’ve checked the spam folder every time.
Got it. And how do you publish posts? On the web? Via the command line or email? If it’s on the web, are you publishing them straight to your blog? Or do you publish as an Anonymous post and then later move the post to your blog?
I always publish on the web. I publish an anonymous post and then move them to my blog.
Okay, so I would assume this is what’s happening:
Emails send on a 15 minute delay from the published date. That date is initially set when you publish the anonymous post, and then remains the same when you move it to your blog. So if you move it to your blog after that 15 minute window, the email won’t get sent.
To work around this, you could keep your publishing flow, but:
- before moving the post to your blog, update the published date to the current date and time (by clicking the “now” button)
- then move it to your blog
That would make sure your posts always get emailed out.
Of course, I know that’s not an enjoyable workflow, so this is a bit of an open question as to how we solve this.
As it stands today, I’m not sure we want to automatically update the published date when you move an anonymous post to a blog, because people could be moving it for other reasons besides publishing a draft.
I think the problem comes down to us mixing “anonymous posts” with “drafts.” I know this gray area has caused confusion with other users, and indeed in WriteFreely, these kinds of posts are actually just called Drafts. Maybe it’s time to make a more formal “draft” feature, to make all of this more straightforward? Among other things, then we could ensure that the published date is automatically updated, and so your posts always get sent out.
Any thoughts or feedback?
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Thank you so much for your help. I think a separate “drafts” feature would be nice, though I do like the “anonymous posts” feature. I found that the ease of reading my posts within a browser before publishing to my blog allowed me to more easily ask friends for editing/opinions.
Maybe a pop-up saying something along the lines of “adjust publishing date” appears when moving a post from anonymous to blog?
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Hey!
I also noticed this strange behavior… I did not know about the 15 min delay after creation date.
I personally think that it should be 15 min after making a post live but it’s no biggie now that I know how it works.
Another thing that I notice is that the email does not have the quote in the post. Please find screenshots attached.
Thanks,
Martin.
What about using another field? You keep “published_time” as it is (that keeps the blog’s order) and set “live_time” (time where it moved to blog) whenever the user makes the post “go live”
Then the script that sends the emails uses the live_time field instead of published_time for sending emails.
My two cents,
Martin.
Here is how I use anonymous posts as drafts to avoid this issue:
- I start writing my draft as an anonymous post.
- When I’m ready to publish, I copy the content of the anonymous post and paste it into a new post for the blog I’m publishing it to.
This workflow avoids the slug/url, publish date and email issues that can surface when moving an anonymous post into a blog.
Not exactly a solution to the problem. Just sharing a possible workaround.
I just realized that while this looks like a “bug”, it might actually be a feature. I can use this to stop certain posts from being sent in an email to email subscribers.
@matt - 2 ways i see this working mo betta… plus an additional caveat for
consideration in the same ux flow~
both have an element in common – seperate drafts tab inside of the :W: dropdown upperleft.
way one- drafts have an option of having a faster cron job for the batching…
say every minute. i know i know. but people do expect that kind of responsiveness in general.
esp when they get busy multi tasking and mind fractalizing due to work constraints, having to use the toilet, kids running amok or other life stuff 
in this setup fast cron batching can scale as a premium feature for say, 3-4$ or month extra. you
can use -async- and lock files on the pid to keep this consistent…
scheduled posts would clearly be indicated to still retain the 15, or if non 3-4$ option is added as to a users feature-set, they can opt for every 7 minutes or every ten minutes, as a sane halfway step.
way 2:
make everything go faster, but as we both know this does not scale as well…long term. and breaks a lot of processes, serverside mostly causing load balancing abd memory issues.
are we running opcache or memcached? this kind of stuff is ultimatelty not the road anyone wants to administer, or config- rapid refresh stuff like that- again scalability and too much renicing internally in the process table. systemD is almost nearly better at this than systemV was but not quite.
the caveat: i still get really really confused UI wise when i have to visit write.as first to get the login cookie - to get the :W: dropdown menu, as i use custom domains.
esp if i was still logged in last night or earlier in my day. can we consider adjusting the ttl on the server cookie? say something stupid like 57,000 seconds? that would help a lot and is worth testing.
that way i could just open a custom domain in safari and see the W straight away.
– about the above-- can i code a python module or something that uses python to hit the api and create a firefox extension or somesuch for mozilla sea monkey (my dev browser of choice), its more
compliant than ff builds even the dev branch, and although its not as bleeding edge and a lot of new webtech breaks because of that decision a few years ago to entirely fork seamonkey away from any ff code, i feel it is overall a much more stable browser.
the reason for the py code would
be this- i cant see that im not logged into write as fastly without first visiting write.as and logging in, and the pycode could interact with go to make that automagic via scraping the users local cookie jar and handling it. et viola always logged in, so to speak.
this happens to me every day it screws up my attention momentarily whule im trying to copy paste my post and create new (the plugin would automatically bring you to the new post as well. this would likely improve a lot of peoples overall experience.
you can code it? if you like the idea enough and im happy to be the test rabbitnand help you debug it…
Just wanted to add my own related thread and - most importantly - the problem/solution I just recently realized. (95% certain about it.):