I recently installed 7.x-1.1 to manage subscriptions to blog posts. I set all new users to be automatically subscribed to new blog posts and then imported all of my users into the site. When the first blog post was created, I noticed that the new content notification was sent to only 17 of my 98 users. Searching through the documentation and issue queue I found that notifications are not sent to users who have not yet logged in (the 'access' field of the row for the user in the users table is zero), since they are not considered active users. However, in my use-case, such users are considered active - even if a user hasn't logged in, they still needed to receive new content updates. IMO, it would be better to allow the site administrator to determine whether users who have not logged in should be considered active or inactive. Could the option to send notifications to users who have not logged in be added as a configuration setting in the Subscriptions Admin UI?

Comments

couturier’s picture

couturier commented

You can do the exact same thing with the Rules module and flagging options. Read the Tiny Book of Rules on this site for more information if you are interested. This is an extremely powerful way to trigger actions, and you can select exactly whom you want to receive notifications. This is an alternate method to using the Subscriptions module.

Also note that if any of those users who have not "opted in" to your blog post notifications don't like them, they may mark those messages as spam. Then, any future messages you send won't be received in their inboxes. Also, if you are on shared hosting, then the whole server may be blacklisted by Google or other mail service providers, affecting other domains as well. It is best practice to let users opt in to receiving notifications. You can allow them to do this when they sign up.

Tiny Book of Rules: https://drupal.org/files/tiny-book-of-rules.pdf

salvis’s picture

salvis
he/his
commented
Issue summary: View changes
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Sorry for the late response.

It's Drupal core that does not consider users active that have never logged in. Technically it would be possible for Subscriptions to ignore the standard set by core, but as couturier has pointed out, this could get you into trouble pretty quickly.

If you want to make your ghost users active, then use phpMyAdmin or some other method to set their access time to non-zero.