question regarding e-mailed notification of comments

  • creativebloomings · Member ·

    Hi. We have a few frequenters of our site who say they recently began getting notifications in their email whenever anyone ‘likes’ or responds to one of their comments. They assume this is because of a setting on our end, but I don’t see anything that might make that possible. Can you please help? They don’t want notifications for every comment they make out here on our Poetic Bloomings site, and I don’t blame them.

    Thanks in advance for your help.
    Marie Elena Good of Poetic Bloomings

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • fstat · Staff ·

    Hi,

    This is something they need to adjust on their accounts. They need to go to their Notifications settings and turn off the notifications for likes and comment replies. Here’s a link to that page:

    https://wordpress.com/me/notifications/comments

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    Just adding here, that I also received an email notification earlier today of a reply to my comment on another site when I hadn’t signed up to get comment notifications by email on that site.

    Is this a new default setting or did something reset itself along the way with an update?

  • bookstooge · Member ·

    Something reset. Because this just started happening to me as well and I know I haven’t changed any options in the settings.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Can you both double check to see what you have here?
    https://wordpress.com/me/notifications/comments

    If it’s checked, can you uncheck to see if that helps?

    I’m wondering whether that was inadvertently “checked” for some people, or whether the checkbox isn’t working. Please let us know.

  • bookstooge · Member ·

    and unchecked. I’ll check back in later to let you if that changed anything.

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    I’ve unchecked it now. Will let you know.

    (Also noting that I was receiving double email notifications on comments on my site’s blog posts, too.)

  • bookstooge · Member ·

    Ok, I just received a notification that someone replied to a comment of mine on another site. I did not get an email.

    but I did not originally check that box. So something wordpress did checked it. and since that option is not alongside the “settings: discussion” options (even though it is exactly that), there is no easy way to find it to uncheck it. If staff hadn’t given that link, I never would have found that place to uncheck it.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Thanks, honestly I wouldn’t have known to check it either. One of my colleagues mentioned it.

    I’m not sure how it got checked in the first place… I know mine was not checked before, and still isn’t, so this is going to take some sleuthing.

    Would either of you have a date for when this started?

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    And thank you @justjennifer, doubles of unexpected notifications sounds like a pain! Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this.

  • bookstooge · Member ·

    Here’s the comment that was the first one I recieved an email for outside of my own site:

    The Sandman, Vol. 1 & 2 (“Preludes and Nocturnes” & “The Doll’s House”) by Neil Gaiman

    That should give you the date and time…

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Thanks! We’ll get a few of these and see if we can trace back to a change.

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    @justjennifer and @creativebloomings, if you could share the subject line or post name for the first unexpected email you got, too, that would be helpful. Thanks in advance!

    And for what it’s worth, we did recently have some design changes. Is there any chance emails that were filtered before are just now coming through because of those changes?

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    @supernovia The first instance was a reply to a comment that I made on someone else’s site. The subject line was [New comment] September 2022 calendars AFAIK I had not subscribed to receive comment replies by email on that site.

    The second instance was a comment on a post on my own site, where I was already receiving replies by email to my posts.

    The first email subject line, which I expected, was [WPcomMaven] Comment: “Working in the Classic Editor c. 2022” but it was followed by a second email with the subject line [New comment] Working in the Classic Editor c. 2022 and both related to the same comment.

    I unchecked the box on comment notifications that @fstat linked to after posting above and I am no longer receiving the [New comment] notifications. Again, AFAIK I never checked that box to begin with so I there was nothing to filter, which is why I wondered if a recent platform update was responsible.

    I also hope this other comment notification setting (now unchecked) doesn’t override or interfere with comment emails on a P2 (FH) I belong to. :) Thanks.

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Awesome, thanks for that info Jen, I’ve pasted it on to the team along with the other incidents we’re tracking, thanks!

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    So it turns out that checkbox existed before, but it didn’t work. That feature was fixed recently in a batch of related issues.

    My guess is that some of you had checked it at some point, likely out of curiosity, or even while helping someone who was struggling with it.

    When it suddenly started working again, a handful of people got some unexpected emails. Sorry about that! Unchecking the box will stop them.

    Let us know if you run into any other issues with this!

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