Some board administrators have reported to us that after upgrading to Discus 4.0, whenever a message is posted to the board, they receive a large number of e-mail notification messages. This document serves to explain that situation.

Invariably, this situation happens when the "BCC" method of sending e-mail messages has been enabled. Whenever a message is sent, the "To" address on the message is set to that specified in Options Manager (which is generally the e-mail address of the board administrator). The e-mail address of the recipient is put in the "BCC" field in this situation.

Previous versions of Discus (3.10 and before) sent one e-mail message for each notification, with the "To" address of the board administrator, and many BCC addresses. Version 4.0 personalizes the content of each message being sent to the users, placing links to jump to edit the profile, identifying information for replying by e-mail, the choice of HTML content in the messages, and so on. Thus, a separate message is generated for each recipient. And, if the "to" address points to an actual, real e-mail address, this address will receive a substantial volume of mail.

It is important to note that the only address that will notice a change is the "To" address for the messages as entered in your Options Manager (generally, this is you, the board administrator). Your users will not have been receiving multiple copies of single posts.

This situation is not a problem or a bug in the Discus program itself, but is due to the e-mail notification configuration settings that you are using. The following are some solutions that will resolve the issue of you receiving many messages. These suggestions are in the order of best to worst workarounds:

1. Switch to cron-based e-mail sending

   Discus 3.10 and 4.00 both have the feature where outgoing messages are stored as text files when generated. Later on, another process (not one that the user has to wait for in the Discus interface) comes along and reads these text files, sending the messages out as e-mail. This feature requires the ability to set up a "cron job" (scheduled task) on your server.

   Related document: Discus cron-based e-mail sending

2. Change the "to" address to a "throwaway" address

   It is possible, and generally very easy, to configure an e-mail address on a server that will automatically discard any messages sent to that address. If you have such an address set up, use this as your "To" address. If such an address does not exist, ask your web host to set one up for you.

   Note: Do NOT just make up an address. If you do, you will receive many bounced messages and the e-mail messages may not go through to the intended recipients.

3. Switch to single message per recipient sending

   Under the Options Manager - E-mail tab, click the "Configure E-mail Notification" button. Under "Sending Method:" choose "Separate message to each recipient." Test and save your settings.

4. Use the Discus Task Manager

   The Discus Task Manager is an experimental feature in version 4.0 that should be used only be people who understand the brief technical description given in the next paragraph, and are sure their system is compatible and their web host won't mind. To use the Task Manager, go to the Options Manager - Other tab and check the "Enable Discus Task Manager" box and the "Sending of e-mail messages" box. You must also do the previous step, which is to switch to single message per recipient sending.

   Technical description of task manager: The Discus scripts use a "fork" to start a new process running under the UID of the web server. Posting operations create e-mail sending tasks for the task manager but do not themselves perform the operation. The task manager wakes up every few seconds to check for new tasks, and performs them if any exist. This speeds up the user interface, since creating a task is a very fast procedure, and the task manager performs the time-intensive operations independent from a user's browser session. Note that the task manager spawns a separate process that runs continuously, so be sure your web host allows this (ask them if you are not sure). Also, the "fork" command is implemented on many unix-based operating systems, but not all, and is not functional on Windows servers. Enabling the task manager has the potential to crash your server and break your board. DiscusWare therefore provides no support for the use of the task manager functionality.

Related document: Board administrator gets two copies of some e-mail notification messages