Recommendations

Testing Notifications

To test notifications you need to use at least two different users:

• One that follows and creates alerts
• One that generates site activity (listing, review, etc).

Users will not get notifications if:

• They are the ones triggering the activity. For example if you follow a category and you submit a listing or a review in that category you don't receive a notification. Only other users receive it.
• Someone other than the owner of the activity (listing owner, review owner, etc.) updates the activity. For example, if an admin updates a listing on behalf of another user a notification will not be sent.

Notification frequency

• Immediate notifications are sent right away, unless you have the Queue Add-on active and are queuing email notifications.
• Daily notifications are sent once every 24 hour period. If a user receives a notification now, he won't receive another one until at least 24 hours later. They are not sent at a specific time, they are sent in batches throughout the day to avoid sending thousands of emails at the same time. The system retrieves a batch and sends the notifications. Then those are marked as sent, and process is repeated.
• Weekly notifications work similar to daily notifications.

You can manually trigger the cron by copying the cron URL from the JReviews administration and pasting it in the browser URL.

Re-sending notifications

The followinng only applies to daily and weekly notifications because there's no way to re-send immediate notifications.

You can reset the last sent date for user subscriptions to trigger the notifications again. The database table #__jreviews_engage_follow, which contains individual user follows and alerts, has a follows_notify_sent column that keeps track of the last notification sent for a particular subscription. If the value is NULL it means nothing been sent for this subscription. To re-send past notifications you can reset the value to NULL or change it to a past date for testing purposes, then run the browser URL.

Web Push Message Icons

If you didn't upload your custom icons while performing the OneSignal configuration, we recommend that you do this as soon as possible. In some cases, like when using Apple Safari, subscribed users will see the icon that was set at the time they subscribed, regardless of whether you change the icon later.

Email Provider

Since the Add-on is all about notifications, the higher the number of subscribers the more emails sent from your server. We recommend using an email provider that gives you access to sent mail logs where you can see that everything is working as expected.

Email Testing Provider

For testing purposes, to prevent test notifications from being sent out to site users, we recommend using something like Mailtrap. When using the SMTP details provided by Mailtrap, all emails sent from your site are delivered to your Mailtrap inbox, instead of going out to your site users.

Cookies and Privacy

Only logged in users can subscribe for push notifications in EngageUsers and the login functionality of your site requires cookies, by the time the user subscribes for push notifications, he already accepted the cookie policy on your site.

The free OneSignal plan will collect some user data, so we recommend updating the privacy policy on your site to reflect this. Our custom implementation of OneSignal ensures that users agree to the privacy policy terms before seeing the browser's native notification prompt.