Troubleshooting missing notifications

I’ve got an Indico 2.0.3 install that I’ve inherited which seems to be failing to send notifications.

The report I got is from our programme committee indicating that when they accepted a contribution, with the ‘send notifications to submitter’ checkbox checked, no notification was sent out. They also did not receive any notifications to the admin email addresses.

The submission notifications for Call for Abstracts, in Abstract Acceptance, is set to ‘Accepted as no type’. The person reporting the problem indicates that they were accepting the abstract with no type assigned, and that this has been their workflow in the past. It seems to me that based on the behaviour they want that ‘any type’ might be a better configuration option, but I agree that based on that configuration this should have sent out notifications.

I see no activity in the log that indicates any sort of notification being sent. Although, I don’t see a clear indication in the log of where the abstract in question was accepted either, so it’s possible Indico doesn’t log that type of activity… ?

The relevant snippets of logging.yaml are:

root:
 level: INFO
 handlers: [other]
handlers:
  indico:
    class: logging.FileHandler
    filename: indico.log
    filters: [indico]
    formatter: default
  celery:
    class: logging.FileHandler
    filename: celery.log
    filters: [celery]
    formatter: simple

I’m not entirely sure where to go from here with troubleshooting. I don’t see anything obviously wrong in the configuration, and there are no errors logged to the Indico logs, celery logs, or redis logs.

I haven’t yet found a way in the interface to re-trigger notifications, so even if I found a thing to change, I’m not sure how I’d test whether it fixed the problem.

And, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find a copy of the documentation for 2.0.3 … it looks like when readthedocs.io is updated, old versions of the documentation are overwritten.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to figure out what’s misbehaving here?

Thanks!

Does your Indico instance send any other emails successfully?

  • If the answer is no: Is Celery running? Also, check if there’s something in the event log (event management → reports → logs) about the email, and if yes, which color the letter icon next to it has.
  • If the answer is yes: Check in the particular abstract if any notifications have been logged for it. In addition to the event log, we log for each abstract whenever a notification is sent. There’s an “x notifications sent” text somewhere on the page when viewing the abstract.

2.0.x isn’t supported anymore, so you should update soon :slight_smile: Anyway, there aren’t that many important changes as far as the docs are concerned.

Does your Indico instance send any other emails successfully?

Yes, definitely.

Celery is running (and logging what looks like normal behaviour).

I don’t see any indication that a notification was sent about accepting these submissions in the main event log. The abstract’s log indicates 1 Notification sent at the bottom of the page. When I click on that it shows the notification for the original submission of the abstract back in January, and nothing related to the acceptance of the submission (which is the last thing in the abstract’s log).

So this leads me to believe we’ve got a configuration problem with the event. Having had another look at the abstracts in question, the accepted ones have a type of “Standard Presentation” which clearly is not “no type”. I’ll advise the users that they need to change their ruleset.

Is there any way we can re-trigger notifications for these abstracts that have already been accepted?

2.0.x isn’t supported anymore, so you should update soon :slight_smile: Anyway, there aren’t that many important changes as far as the docs are concerned.

An upgrade is planned… but unfortunately I’ve also inherited a very long list of things to be done, including fixing a lot of things that are actively broken. Updating an out-of-date application that seems to be working correctly is way low on the TODO list. :slight_smile: Especially considering that we’re coming up on a workshop. If anything goes wrong with the update I want that to happen a week or two after the workshop, not a month before.

Thanks very much for your help!

You could reset the judgment on the abstract and then judge it again.