Announcements forum in Moodle

Announcements forum in Moodle

by Ejiro Ekpogbe -
Number of replies: 5

Dear Colleagues,

I  hope you are doing well. I am having an issue with the Announcements forum in my Moodle site 3.5.1. When messages are posted on the Announcements forum, most times not all the participants in the course receive these messages. The most recent was yesterday, a message was posted in the Announcement forum in a course with 65 students. Only 36 students received the message.

What could be the cause of this and how do we fix it?

Your suggestions are highly appreciated.

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In reply to Ejiro Ekpogbe

Re: Announcements forum in Moodle

by C Behan -
Many possible reasons but start with checking the subscribers list and the superscription mode of the forum.
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In reply to Ejiro Ekpogbe

Re: Announcements forum in Moodle

by Jon Bolton -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers
How have you configured your email? SMTP or the internal
PHP mailer?

Have you checked your server emails logs?

Are there any common factors that you can identify of those not receiving email (eg. are they on the same email domain, etc)?

Have recipients checked their spam folder?

This forum post may also give you some ideas: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=386816#p1559438
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In reply to Jon Bolton

Re: Announcements forum in Moodle

by Ejiro Ekpogbe -
Dear Jon,
Thank you for your response. We use Gmail as our SMTP server and our SMTP user name is tied to an existing account in our institutional google domain. When messages are sent from moodle (forum, new user accounts, notifications, etc), records of these messages are stored in the "Sent" folder of the gmail account, and that is where i go to check that a message sent from moodle has been received by the enrolled/subscribed users. From the sent folder, I am able to tell those that didn't such message.

The issue lies only with sending forum messages. Other messaging channels e.g Notifications, seem to be working fine.

As it is an Institutional account, all subscribed users are on one domain. I am not able to check the SMTP server logs as I do not manage the Google account for my institution.

I will contact the administrator to request for access but my concern is, what should I be checking for? Will I get a solution to the problem from the logs?
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In reply to Ejiro Ekpogbe

Re: Announcements forum in Moodle

by C Behan -

Ejiro,

It would be worth checking the preferences for one of these students who aren't receiving forum notices.

  • Have they disabled notifications?
  • What are their notification settings for forums?
  • What are their forum preferences? Have they set it that they only want to receive one notice per day about forum notices?


Attachment forum_pref.jpg
Attachment notication_pref.jpg
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