WordPress settings – an apology

In an earlier post I mentioned that I’d had an unsatisfactory year with a particular email client. I thought that once I changed to Fastmail, all my problems would be over. Not quite. Everything seemed to be working properly, but I did notice a sudden drop in WordPress notifications. At first, I assumed this was simply because Fastmail was ‘catching up’ with the output from bloggers I follow. It’s now been almost a month, and I’m still not getting notifications from all the people I regularly read. What the…?

I guess I should have noticed something was wrong sooner, but as I was getting some email notifications, I just thought the missing bloggers weren’t posting much. Another thing that stopped me from investigating sooner was that I was finding some posts via Twitter. Given that my brain is getting older, it never occurred to me to check for those same posts in my inbox…

But enough excuses.This morning I finally went into my WordPress Reader/Streams/Followed sites/Manage and discovered that WP has done something weird again. To be exact, it seems to have changed the default settings to this:

Each slider button is set to ‘off’. When I turned the first ‘Email me new posts’ slider to ‘on’, I received an alert telling me to click a link to email notifications. There, I found a tick next to a checkbox about blocking email notifications. I’m pretty sure I didn’t do that. 😦

Once I unchecked that option, I noticed some of my old settings showing up again. Yay.

Working through my followers list one by one, I noticed that many of my ‘regulars’ had been turned off [like the pic above]. Some of these bloggers are people I consider to be friends as well as ‘regulars’.

To all of you, my sincerest apologies. I haven’t ignored you out of disinterest; I genuinely haven’t been getting notifications. 😦

Have I fixed the problem now? Sadly, I don’t know. The reason is that some bloggers with notifications turned off have still been appearing in my email inbox. Others, whose settings showed as ‘on’ already, haven’t been appearing.

Another problem is that I’m not sure exactly how the notification settings work. Do I need to turn on ‘Notify me of new posts’ as well as ‘Email me new posts’? The first one seems to be for web and mobile only so does it apply only to the WordPress Reader? Or is it a kind of pre-requisite for the other two options as well?

I have no idea at the moment, so I’m going to have to wait and see. In the meantime, please know that I’m having technical difficulties, and that I’m not snubbing you!

-hugs-

Meeks