Just in case anyone is interested, I added to my BuddyPress support thread. Still no reply, but here’s what I found…
I’m seeing the pattern now. Even in forums more than a decade old (and before @ mentions became a feature on many sites), people used @username even if it did nothing. This was simply shorthand for getting a specific person’s attention in a thread with many participants.
Looks as though BuddyPress is trying to be smart and pull these @ mentions from old content and add them to the activity stream. Since it’s a new addition to the activity stream, BuddyPress also thinks it’s new and therefore sends out an email notification. This is why it only affects old members.
Now… How do stop it?
Stopping notifications across the board is not a good idea. Even if I do it now and turn it back on later, we’ll never know when an old member might join us again. So really the only solution is to have BuddyPress stop importing old forum posting with the ‘@’ character into a new activity.
Still open to suggestions. Thanks.
After import of phpBB, sending notifications to users on very old replies
After first posting, I kept digging. It does look like it came from BuddyPress. I initially thought it was bbPress, since it was linked to a forum reply. But apparently, after the old users logged into the new site as themselves again, BuddyPress grabbed the forum replies (even though really old) and added it to the user’s activity stream. That’s what triggered the email notification. I’ll throw a support ticket their way. Let’s keep this open for now until I get an answer from them. Thanks.
