Notifications not working

[dmurphy2756]

We recently upgraded a small community from IPS 3.4.6 to 4.4.10, and we've been mostly happy with the changes, but there seems to be a major problem with the notifications system. It seemed to work correctly for the first ~3 days, but since then (about a week ago) I haven't received a single notification icon or email for my followed topics. I don't know if it's affecting the entire community or not - I can see that there are emails repeatedly being sent from the server to some users, so I assume that some people are getting their normal subscription emails and I haven't received any support messages about the problem yet. However, I've spoken directly with a couple of members who have confirmed they're not receiving notifications either, so I know it's not just my settings, and I've tried every setting (in both the admin panel and my own notification setting) that could affect this. 

Has anyone else experienced this, and if so, how did you solve it? I know the first option should be, "open a support ticket", but the last time I tried that I was rather tersely advised to "upgrade to 4.5.3". We're not ready for that just yet, and I'd really like to know why this issue is happening first. 

[bfarber]

I would recommend looking for some sort of pattern. Find something that you believe you should have been notified about and then look at potential reasons you weren't.

• There's an option to prune follows if there haven't been any updates in a period of time. Make sure under Manage Followed Content you are still following the area or thing.
• Check your notification preferences and make sure they're set to send you email updates.
• Check your spam folder in your email provider
• Check your email error logs in the AdminCP and make sure there aren't errors sending you the notifications.
• Check the system logs and make sure there aren't general errors logged that might explain the issue.

There are probably other things you could check but I'd start there.

[dmurphy2756]

Thanks for the response! I believe we finally figured out the issue - in the notification settings for 4.4.10, one of the options is labeled, "When someone comments on something I follow", and it seems like this setting is what controls topic reply notifications. Given that topic replies are called "posts", not "comments" (and there are other settings on that page which make a clear distinction between "posts" and "comments"), we naturally assumed that "comments" referred to some aspect of the IPS software that we didn't use/have a license for, so we had disabled those notifications. Hopefully these settings are a bit less confusing in 4.5!