Rss plugin not sending any mails on the second repeat

I’ve configured the Rss plugin and a campaign to send out any new items every four weeks. The first time it works fine, but the second time it does have contents (the new items) but it doesn’t send it out to anybody on the list.

Has anybody else seen this problem before? Am I doing something wrong?

Below the report page where you can see that new campaign was created when the previous one ran and you can see that the first one was send to 100 people and the second to no-one.

@hansdezwart Look at the Event Log page, something might have been reported there.

Thanks for the quick reply!

Yes, it does show some things in the event log, but not enough information for me to figure out what goes wrong:

You appear to have changed the “stop sending after” date for the campaign on the Scheduling tab. That is usually 6 months after the campaign is created but for your campaign 19 it looks to be much shorter.
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Unless you have explicitly set it then the default value is actually 7 days, not 6 months as I thought. You can change that by adding this to the config.php file

define('DEFAULT_MESSAGEAGE', 15768000);

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You might have found the problem! I will set things up once more and will make sure to pay attention to this value.

Do you know if the automatic reschedule also updates this value or should I just set it way into the future?

You can edit the current RSS campaign (due to be sent in early June) to have a stop sending date in 6 months time, then resubmit it.

But also add or change the setting in config.php because that value will be used when the current campaign is sent and a new one created.

The way that phplist sets the “stop sending” date for a repeated campaign isn’t really too useful, so using a long interval is a good idea.

You could try changing the stop sending date on the campaign sent on 5 May then resubmit that, if the content is still relevant.

I forgot to add that I have made a change to the plugin to validate that DEFAULT_MESSAGEAGE is greater than the repeat interval. You can upgrade the plugin on the Manage Plugins page.

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Are you the creator of the plugin‽ Thank you so much for making it! I find the functionality incredible and am so happy with the beautiful things that I can make with it. :smile:

And it is wonderful that you fix things this quickly when a user runs into some obscure problem.

This Sunday morning I will try and sort everything out (update the plugin, change config.php, and reschedule the existing campaign). I have to do a little bit of manual stuff, because my interval is four weeks, but because I also want to make sure that items that our five weeks old are taken into the next mailing.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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I have just now sent out my campaign and it seemed to work fine. A new active campaign has been created that does use the DEFAULT_MESSAGEAGE time that I added to config.php:

dates

I did notice one other thing that could possibly be improved:

When I use the Send test option it doesn’t seem that the e-mail takes into account the time limitation of the repeat interval. So, it also send me RSS items that were older than the four week interval that I use. I didn’t dare to try and send it out like that, so I temporarily lowered the Maximum number of items to send in an RSS email to the number of items that I wanted to send out.

Yes, that is deliberate so that the test message will contain at least some of the feed content.
For example, if the repeat interval is one day, but you are preparing the campaign more than 1 day in advance then any feed items will have been published earlier than the embargo less 1 day.

I guess that including both “old” and “recent” items together may have caused the confusion, so I can change the processing so that it includes only “recent” (within embargo less the repeat interval) if there are any, otherwise any “old” items, otherwise the sample items.

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Thank you for making that change!

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