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Notifications from staging sites

3

It would be nice to be able to automatically turn off notifications from staging sites.

My default for notifications/reports is generally “monthly” and I get them from several plugins (Forminator, Defender, SmartCrawl, etc…). If I turn off the staging site notifications manually, then I have to remember to re-enable them when I promote.

In the meantime, I just delete all the staging messages…

Mon, 5 Dec 2022 13:57:44
  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Jack Lavender

    Thanks for confirmation!

    It might be a bit difficult to achieve currently as all those notifications are still not fully “centralized” (so not controlled and being send via a single central “notifications tool”) but I can see the point here.

    I’d like to move this ticket to our Feature Request forum so we could consider it a feature request, suggest to our Hosting/Hub teams and, hopefully, grab some more feedback and support form other Members.

    Is it okay with you?

    Best regards,
    Adam

  • Jack Lavender
    • The Crimson Coder

    I understand the complexity, but “hope springs eternal…” :smiley:

    Please feel free to move this to the Feature Request forum. Thank you.

    For the record, the reason I created this was, in part, a reaction to the bug in Forminator that sent me over 60 reports for one of my staging sites. It sent me over 100 for the related production site.

  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Jack Lavender

    Thanks, I converted it to be a feature request now.

    As for the Forminator bug – yeah, I completely understand this. It’s quite an annoying bug and we’re very sorry that it happened. It should be fixed soon.

    Nonetheless, I can see how useful it could be anyway to be able to get all those notifications “auto-disabled” like that (though it would probably be good to be able to also turn them back on “with one click” on staging – e.g. in case you’d like to test any of them on staging).

    Like I mentioned, I wouldn’t expect it soon but it certainly is something worth looking into and taking under consideration.

    Thank you for suggesting it!

    Best regards,
    Adam

  • Marcel Oudejans
    • Ex Staff

    Hi Jack Lavender

    I understand the issue you raise. While there is currently no “WPMUDEV solution”, I can describe the method I use on a project site of mine.

    I use the WP SMTP Mail plugin on one of my sites, because the site uses Mailgun API to send emails. That plugin has an option to “Stop sending all emails”. Once I’ve staged the site, I enable that function so that no emails are sent. This blocks all plugins’ notification emails too.

    In this case, because the plugin I use to send the emails also has this “Stop sending emails” function, it’s a matter of enabling it once I stage the site.

    However, it’s not the only plugin that can do this. For example, Disable Emails (free on wp.org) can be activated to stop all emails sending. So you can install this plugin on Production and leave it deactivated. Once you’ve staged the site, activate the plugin on staging to stop all emails.

    I hope this helps you.

    Kind regards,
    Marcel

  • Jack Lavender
    • The Crimson Coder

    Not to beat a dead horse, but here’s another twist on this.

    I created a Staging site for one of my clients. There was a scheduled export of form submissions on the production site (weekly). Today, I get a call from my client asking why they got TWO reports and the data was a little different.

    As we were talking about it, I realized what had happened. I’ve logged into the Staging site and disabled the reporting. Now I have to make sure to remember to re-enable the reporting when I promote.

    Jack

  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Jack Lavender

    Yes, I can see how annoying or troublesome this may be. But, as said, there’s not much more that we could do at the moment. Just to be clear on this: I’m not saying it will stay like that “forever” and nothing will change.

    You’ve provided very useful and valuable feedback on this and this entire subject has been raised a few times “here and there” and it is something that is “on the radar” to some degree and while updating and improving our plugins we are gradually also improving how all the notifications and reports in them are handled so at some point it should be possible to finally do some “centralized management” of those. And then also such “one click” and/or “automated” live vs staging on/of switching should be possible. I just don’t know when and at the moment not really able to make any predictions.

    Marcel’s “workaround” actually sounds quite nice to me. I haven’t tested it yet but I am planning to give it a go on some of my own test setups as I’m also sometimes being “flooded” with unnecessary notifications. I think for now it might be a reasonable workaround :)

    Best regards,
    Adam