Forum followers removed automatically

[Todd R]

I set up a new forum (self-hosted) for a client at the start of 2023.  Using the Bulk Followers plugin, they are adding people as followers of certain forums so they get notifications to new posts, rather than relying on them to do it (this is a members only forum so they aren't intentionally spamming people.)

On several occasions they have had several people "drop" from following a forum.  Today was an example - there should have been 47 people following a forum, but when they checked before a post (which they are doing because they don't trust things at this point), there were 17.  So they added those people back as followers so they would be notified of an important announcement.

I compared the list of the people who remained on the list to those who had dropped and had to be added back.  The main difference I could see is that those who had been dropped from following have never logged into the site yet.  Those who hadn't been dropped from following had all logged in.

I checked the prune settings for Notifications and it shows the "Remove Follows" as 365 days, with the "never" not checked (see attachment).  So this tells me it's not the culprit.  But could it be?  Should this be set to "never" to make sure it never does?  It's the only thing that makes sense to why this is happening.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Todd

 

[Makoto]

Are you sure these members themselves aren't simply opting out of notifications in the forum via email or by manually in following the forum?

Have you talked with any of the people removed to confirm whether or not they unsubscribed from following this forum deliberately?

Edited March 21, 2023 by Makoto

[Todd R]

Having 30 out of 47 remove themselves within a week doesn't seem possible.  Plus, none of them have logged in, which is required to update their preferences.

[Richard Arch]

With those settings the followers will be removed again unless they login.

[Todd R]

But the forum is only about 90 days old.  Don't those settings say that the system should only prune after someone hasn't logged in for 365 days?

[Richard Arch]

Ah, missed that point.  If it removes them again (24hrs) it would be worth trying the never option and reporting a possible bug.

[Todd R]

I'm wondering the same thing.  Since it's a members only forum, and anyone who is no longer a member is removed, I might just change the setting now and see if that solves the issue.  Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something else!

[Todd R]

Sorry for continuing this topic as I don't really see how to message the support team directly or provide feedback.

Another issue that I discovered is the "recent activity" panel is not very accurate (discovered while testing this).  If, in fact, it was the system that pruned these users as followers, there is not a trace of it anywhere that I can find.  That would be very useful information to have!

 

[Marc]

We would need some examples of this, but the reality here is that these are not actually being added in the standard manner. You would need to test this with someone who has manually followed the forum, rather than automatically been added by external code, as it may well be that external code causing the issue.

 

Feedback can be provided in our feedback forum, which you can find directly here

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/forum/499-feedback/

[Todd R]

Thanks for the response @Marc Stridgen.  I'm not positive if you are responding to the followers falling off the list issue, or that nothing is getting logged in the activity panel.