Forums: pending replies do not send notification after reviewed

[mariovalney]

When a reply is pending on Support Forum no notifications are sended.
It's OK but I guess it should trigger a notification when it's published.

[Clorith]

I'm not sure if this is a good way forward.

If, for example, Akismet flagged something, then there's a high likelihood that the user receiving an email with the same content later will also view it as spam and mark it as such.
Email services work off reputation these days, and we don't want to risk sending content which may be perceived as spam to users.

As for flagged accounts, they are users who have had a behavior that means we want to keep an eye on them, and the notifications being blocked is part of that task, so that we're certain what information ends up where from a potential bad actor.

[mariovalney]

A user who subscribed for a topic (and most important: the author) is waiting for notifications about new content. So it's not spam even sending it later.

If the answer is not OK for forums will not be published, so OK not sending notification.

EDIT: I checked now the discussion on Slack.

First I was thinking about the answers that fall on spam by mistake (if you point a lot of links for docs, for example) but your concern about the mail vendors is a very good point. Maybe we can send a notification with a (not so) generic text pointing to a new answer?

[tobifjellner]

Maybe we can send a notification with a (not so) generic text pointing to a new answer?

I like the idea about just sending an update, like:

Someone has replied in a topic you're following. Here's a link...

Another question: would this be easier to implement upstream, in bbPress? If yes, and if the development isn't overwhelmingly big, then perhaps it would be better to make it happen there?

[vladytimy]

Lots of people may be missing good replies from devs just because they happen to be flagged or Akismet (wrongly) puts the reply in the moderation queue.

I think it's very important that the OP gets a notification when a reply is approved.

​short discussion on Slack

[mariovalney]

Replying to tobifjellner:

Another question: would this be easier to implement upstream, in bbPress? If yes, and if the development isn't overwhelmingly big, then perhaps it would be better to make it happen there?

I like this idea.

Never contributed to bbPress so I'll try to figure out how to take this way. Any suggestion will be appreciated.

[dd32]

In 11978:

Support Forums: Attempt to send notifications for new topics/replies when it's caught within the moderation or spam queue.

bbPress subscription notifications (and WordPress.org's) are hooked to the bbp_new_topic action, however they also verify that the thread is public before notifying.
Unfortunately, bbPress does not trigger the notifications upon the thread being unspammed/approved, and neither do the WordPress.org notifications.

This fixes this condition by triggering the "new topic created" hook after a topic/reply is unspammed/approved for the first time, causing the subscriptions codes to run as if it's a brand-new thread.

This should fix plugin subscription notifications not being sent to some plugin authors, and topic authors who are unaware of a reply because the responding author was caught in a moderation queue.

It's worth noting that replies still only trigger notifications (matchers, topic/forum subscriptions, @mention's, etc) if the topic is public AND the reply will be public.
If a reply is added to a pending topic, notifications for that reply will NOT be re-sent, unless the reply was also in a pending state unrelated to the topic and is then approved after the topic is.

See #3674.

[dd32]

[11978] works around this, but is intended on being a temporary patch as it appears the solution to this needs to be done within bbPress.

Upstream ticket: ​https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3474