Temporarily pausing reminder emails?

Temporarily pausing reminder emails?

by B H -
Number of replies: 3

Thanks for the awesome work on this plugin Henning.

It's been great so far but there's one thing we can't seem to get working. 

We have a situation where we will book students into 20 appointments before they start a course and then give them the opportunity to cancel/rebook the ones they can't attend themselves.

We would like to send them a reminder email when they rebook a slot themselves (on the day that they book it) but we don't want them to each receive 20 email reminders at the start of the course.

Is there a way to temporarily pause those reminder emails? I've tried scheduling slots and enabling/disabling the "Email a reminder on..." setting in various combinations/sequences but the reminder email always seem to arrive about an hour later.

Any ideas or advice? The person managing this would be semi-technical and could go into the plugin files and temporarily add/remove a line of code when they setup a new course if necessary.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer

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In reply to B H

Re: Temporarily pausing reminder emails?

by B H -
Any ideas on this?
In reply to B H

Re: Temporarily pausing reminder emails?

by Henning Bostelmann -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers
Hello
you can stop the reminder e-mails by disabling the relevant "Scheduled Task" in the Moodle administration pages.
However, this will work only temporarily. When the task is re-enabled, it will send out the reminders that were missed. (The same happens when you set the "remind by" date to something in the past - Scheduler will notice that the e-mail has not been sent yet, and will send it on the next available occasion.)
Sending these reminders is done in mod/scheduler/classes/task/send_reminders.php, that's the place where you would need to edit the code in order to change that behaviour (e.g. suppressing the reminder if the date is too far in the past).
In reply to Henning Bostelmann

Re: Temporarily pausing reminder emails?

by B H -
Thanks for the help on this Henning!

In the end we managed to solve this by temporarily turning off the notifications from the plugin in Site administration > notification settings > Reminder of an upcoming appointment.

Luckily it doesn't send out the reminders that were missed when we turn the notifications back on so it's a working as required now smile