OJS 3: spurious emails

Software Support
1

On Monday I patched an OJS installation with the latest changes in the branch ojs-stable-3_0_2 (last sync was in May) because we had experienced the bug with wrong signatures in submission acknowledgments (SUBMISSION_ACK email includes author signature · Issue #2518 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub). Except for some theming our fork should be identical to upstream.

On Tuesday two review reminders were erroneously sent out for manuscripts published in 2012. Could this be related to the patch, or does anybody have any other possible explanations?

2

Hi @simonmitternacht,

Just to confirm, it appears that changes between May and now in the ojs-stable-3_0_2 branch, either for the OJS or pkp-lib repos, appear to have caused these spurious emails to go out?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

Hi @asmecher,
To see if it has happened before using OJS 3, I searched the email logs with the following statement (postgres)

=> select date_sent from email_log where date_sent >= '2017-01-01'::date and body like '%The review itself is due 2012%';
      date_sent
---------------------
 2017-09-05 15:37:25
 2017-09-05 15:37:25
(2 rows)

For due dates in 2011 and 2013-2016 I get 0 rows. Looking at timestamps on changed files I updated the code on 2017-09-05 11:36 (not 2017-09-04 as I indicated in the OP), i.e. only a few hours before the emails were sent.

The only reason I have to believe it has to do with the update is timing. I guess it’s hard to pin down the reason without more detailed context, but I was wondering if there are any known reasons for why this might happen.

4

Hi @simonmitternacht,

I suspect the various flags that get checked before a reminder email is sent differ slightly in structure between OJS 2.x and 3.x – no big surprise, given how different the two applications have become – and that there will be a little bit of impedance mismatch when performing an upgrade. I suspect these two messages are the result. Unless you start to see something systemic, I’m tempted to write these off as part of the upgrade process.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

5

Guess that’s what I suspected :slight_smile:

Thanks anyway!
Simon