We are using a 3.4 OJS installation and this version sends monthly editorial tasks email to users assigned to active submissions.
We had a case of a reviewer that received the “Outstanding editorial tasks” automatic email notification on May 31th, informing him that the editorial team was waiting for a response in a submition that he had already responded and had already been thanked through the system by the editor on May 10th. This submission, by the way, was already on copyediting stage when the email was sent.
This cited user has reviewer and section editor roles, but is only assigned as reviewer
It would be very helpfull if 3.4 OJS version allowed to manage this automatic notifications by enable/disable or editing texts.
I tried to find this automatic email on Workflow / Emails but I couldn’t.
Trying to boost this back up because we are having similar issues with this email.
Is there a way for the Journal Manager to disable the “Outstanding editorial tasks” emails for all users? This email is not helpful and is causing a lot of confusion for our users.
@asmecher We got the same after the upgrade of a large site to OJS 3.4.0-5 - the system immediately began to send out outstanding task mails to our users (both readers and editors) which lead to confusion - especially when tasks were already finished a long time ago. We don’t know yet if all of the about 1500 users were affected.
When a new notification option is introduced in an upgrade, it should be set to disabled first! Rather use opt-in than opt-out as general scheme.
I managed to disable the notifications for outstanding tasks by using the following SQL command:
insert into notification_subscription_settings (setting_name,setting_value,user_id,context,setting_type)
select "blocked_notification", 16777260, user_id, 1, "int" from users;
This worked for the existing users, but how can we configure / code that this notification be disabled for new users that register?
We are afraid that for our multi-journal installation (about 20 journals) that is to be upgraded to OJS 3.4 in a few weeks it will happen again and affect the editorial boards and users of all of these journals. You can’t avoid it for the moment because the mails are triggered when the new notification option is added during the upgrade.
Was there any update on this? @geniusdesign I’m interested to hear whether mistakenly sent emails have continued. We’re upgrading to 3.4 soon and the editorial assignment email is one we think should be very valuable, however, only if it is going to the correct people at the correct times…
We would also love to be able to disable it! For our user it is just confusing, as there are a lot of old submissions, etc. that we cant remove, that still shows up in the "Outstanding editorial tasks”-email.
For one of our journals there is also the problem that the email comes signed from a previous editor. As we cannot find a template for this e-mail, we do not know why she is listed, and people are contacting her about not understanding the email. This feature should have been disabled when implemented, so that people could opt in rather then opt out. We would really like to be able to turn this off.
The SQL command @mpbraendle posted did unfortunately not work for us. Has anyone fond another solution to turning these notifications off? We received a lot of frustrated emails from our editors and their users today, when they again received this email.
Hi @JohannaS , if you have multiple journals, you need to replace the “1” by the corresponding journal id in the SQL command. Also, always make a backup of your database before applying SQL commands.
Hi @JohannaS,
We just had such a request and we are a multi journal host on 3.4.x. I modified the SQL to suit the purpose
/* first get the journal ID we need */
SELECT * FROM journals;
/* using the journal ID from above, replace <journalID> in the SQL statement below and you should good*/
insert into notification_subscription_settings (setting_name,setting_value,user_id,context,setting_type)
select "blocked_notification", 16777260, user_id, <journalID>, "int" from ojs.users where users.user_id in (SELECT distinct user_user_groups.user_id FROM ojs.user_groups JOIN ojs.user_user_groups ON user_user_groups.user_group_id = user_groups.user_group_id WHERE user_groups.context_id = <journalID>);