XF 1.5 Notifications of replies from threads which become inaccessible

[Gladius]

User replies to thread, starts receiving notifications of new replies. Then said thread gets moved to a forum that the user doesn't have access to any more. And yet he's still getting notifications of new replies, with seemingly no way to turn it off since he can't access the thread in question. Is there a way to handle this or is it a bug?

 

[Mike]

The core code checks that the user has permission to view a thread before sending them a watch notification. Beyond that, the alert system would be checking permissions as well, so at best, they'd get a "ghost" alert (a number with no alert).

Given that it sounds like neither of these things apply, I can only guess that there may be an add-on involved.

 

[Gladius]

I assumed that this would be checked, so I was surprised when this was reported to me... I'll check but I can't imagine that there'd be any addons messing around in areas that could affect this.

 

[Gladius]

Actually, it seems that it's the "ghost" alerts you mentioned that the user is seeing, here's his own description:

"For the thread I just get notifications (the little red number) and not emails. When I click the Alerts tab nothing new actually shows up - given the thread is the only one I've posted in that has disappeared outright (assuming it got shuttled to somewhere in another forum) I guessed that it must be the one giving me the pings on Alerts. It's done this a few times but it's difficult to capture evidence of it - just a red "1" over Alerts and then I click the tab and nothing has changed since last time."

That does sound pretty annoying.

 

[Mike]

What I was referring to there was mostly a "in depth" change -- the first thing we do when sending a watch notification is check that the user can view the thread (and the forum it's in). The alert would only be sent if that part was true.

I'd note as well that our standard watch alerts would only trigger for the first reply after they last viewed the thread, even beyond all this, they would normally only receive one alert. It sounds like they're receiving more than that -- unless it's multiple threads?

The only other situation I can think of is if they received the alert/notification before the thread became inaccessible. That's not really avoidable though, and the ghost alert would be expected there. That should be quite infrequent.