@sofy Providing screenshots would require me to have access to our user email accounts, which I obviously cannot provide. 

However, we currently have your “forum censure” plugin installed to moderate wpForo forum posts (a gVectors plugin), and the issue seems to stem from wpForo sending out email notifications every time a post that was put into review is then approved.

This occurred with a post I created as Admin within our News section of the forums, where many users are subscribed. After publishing the post, the forum censor kept flagging it for review—even though I’m the Admin—but that part isn’t the real issue. The problem is that I made over a dozen edits to the same post, and each time the censor plugin placed it back into review. After I approved it, wpForo sent a fresh email notification to all subscribed users. As a result, users received an email every single time I made an edit and re-approved the post.

However, you don’t actually need a screenshot to identify this bug, because here’s what’s happening:

In short, every time a post is under review for moderation, wpForo notifies subscribers about it, and this cycle repeats each time the post is edited. Users should not be sent duplicate email notifications—certainly not after every single edit—simply because they are subscribed to the forum or topic.

You should be able to easily reproduce this on your end. If you run your forum censor plugin alongside wpForo, add some hotlisted words to trigger moderation, then approve the post. You’ll see that wpForo is indeed sending multiple email notifications each time the post is edited, as long as it’s in a subscribed forum or topic.

@sofy I created a test user account for this exact purpose, and I was able to reproduce the bug. It’s not good… please review the attached screenshots.

This has actually been a long-standing bug without me realizing it. It only came to light after several of our users complained about the “spam” our system was sending them.

Issue #1

What’s the point of having forumcensure installed if wpforo still sends out the full text of a pending post to users subscribed to certain parts of the forum? The entire purpose of forumcensur is to keep unapproved posts hidden until moderation approves them.

Right now, if a post is held for moderation, anyone subscribed to that forum section still gets an email with the complete post text, even though it hasn’t been approved. This is clearly a bug or at the very least a major oversight that should be fixed.

Issue #2

Equally concerning is that every single time a post is edited and re-approved via forumcensure, the system then sends out a new email notification as a "new topic" when it's not. One of the attached screenshots below, show this. It's the same post but has just been edited and then re-approved with forumcensure, multiple times.

For example:

• If I make a post,

• Edit it several times,

• And each time it’s re-approved via forum censure...subscribers receive multiple separate emails for the same post.

This makes no sense and is potentially very damaging to customer retention and to our email sender reputation. A single post should not trigger multiple email blasts just because it’s edited and re-approved.

I'm very frustrated, because as a long time wpforo/gvectors customer, I feel like these are very basic bugs that should have been worked out ages ago.

Please advise, thank you.

Posted by: @sofy

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Hi,

Please find below the reason for this issue.

First of all, your post goes to unapproved each time it is edited, so once the post is approved, wpForo sends notifications. You need to disable moderation so that posts don’t go for approval each time they are edited.

I'm sorry but you're not addressing the issue. A I said, I am using your own forum censure addon that I purchased from you. Isn't the entire point of having the forum censure plugin is to moderate certain posts based on keywords that trigger a post to require approval?

If we were to disable moderation for edits as you suggest, then that could obviously (and likely) be abused by users. Users would begin to know that edits don’t trigger moderation, and they would eventually exploit this.

So, my original point stands, which is this: why is wpForo set up to send multiple notices for the same exact post in the first place? Why is it configured to send email notifications simply because the same exact post is edited? This obviously makes no sense.

Please advise and help me understand the logic behind this.