[pmwiki-users] Duplicate email notification

Randy randy at brownragfilms.com
Fri Feb 8 00:06:45 CST 2008


Since I know next to nothing about PHP, servers, and the internals of  
scripts, I don't know what might cause me to get duplicate email  
notification. I need some guidance from people who know more.

Hans and I have been noticing different behavior from Fox forms on his  
system versus mine. Our bare bones test installations are very similar  
and don't include other recipes besides AuthUser. His works fine. Mine  
sends out duplicate email notifications whenever I make page changes  
via a Fox form while logged in, and no notifications at all when I  
make page changes via a Fox form while not logged in. (Normal editing  
through PmWiki gives me correct notifications.)

Here are three clues that seem important:

Clue 1: Before I switched from commentboxplus to fox, I used to get  
duplicate email notifications from commentboxplus (which I believe has  
some code overlap with fox). This started around the time that I  
switched from PmWiki 2.1.x to PmWiki 2.2.x, switched from GoDaddy to  
a2Hosting (which uses a later version of PHP), and updated some recipes.

Clue 2: I switched from commentboxplus to fox in part to eliminate the  
duplicates. It did seem to eliminate most. But I still got duplicates  
when deleting lines via a foxdelete link. Now, with fox's latest  
version, the duplication is occurring consistently, even for adding  
comments.

Clue 3: I created a form on one page that posts to another. After  
using it, I got one notification which says that the form page has  
changed (which is not true), and shows blank for Summary, and a second  
notification that says the target page has changed (which is true) and  
shows the summary that was specified in the form (as expected). This  
implies to me that it's not just the mail system incorrectly putting  
out duplicates as a result of a single event - there's actually two  
separate events going on in some script that is triggering email  
notification twice.

It seems to me those are three important clues as to what is  
happening. But I don't know what they mean or what to test next.

Here are the differences that I suspect exist between our systems:

1. PHP version or configuration
2. Other server software (I'm on Linux, I don't know what Hans is on  
but it's unlikely it's the same exact configuration)
3. Hans has his test site running as part of a farm. As a result, he  
has FoxNotify installed for the farm, though it's not included in the  
test site's config.php. (He says FoxNotify uses different variables  
and functions anyway.) By contrast, I don't have a farm, and have  
never even downloaded FoxNotify.

Can anyone suggest a theory as to why duplication is happening, and  
suggest how to test to track down the cause?

Randy



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