[@rrhode Participant 9 years, 10 months ago]

It looks like there are possibly 2 issues being reported here.

One issue reported by the OP is that emails are not working properly. Another being that people aren’t being notified due to the subscribe checkboxes not actually being checked by default causing people to become unsubscribed when they post replies to topics they were previously subscribed to.

The first issue with emails sounds like it could be conflicts with themes or plugins. However if it is actually an email issue it could also be that the emails from the server aren’t being properly sent or received which could be for a number of reasons such as bad DNS records or improper mail server configuration.

The second issue is that when posting topics or replies the subscription checkboxes are not checked by default. This is described above by Killerrabbit2 here in this post: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/email-notifications-not-working-looking-for-help/#post-153189

I think if bbpress added an option to set the default state of the checkboxes to allow the subscription checkboxes to be checked or unchecked with the default being checked would be part of the solution for the second issue.

You can set the default setting to be checked by editing the bbpress template files /wp-content/plugins/bbpress/templates/default/bbpress/form-topic.php and /wp-content/plugins/bbpress/templates/default/bbpress/form-reply.php and finding the subscription input checkboxes and adding checked to them seems to fix part of it.

<input name="bbp_topic_subscription" id="bbp_topic_subscription" type="checkbox" value="bbp_subscribe" checked tabindex="<?php bbp_tab_index(); ?>" />

Another issue seems to be that it doesn’t subscribe to topics within a forum when subscribing to an entire forum. So for example if you subscribe to a forum and a topic isn’t checked within that forum (which is how bbpress is currently set by default since it doesn’t subscribe to things by default) then it won’t notify you of new replies. Kind of defeats the purpose of subscribing to an entire forum I think. So if you subscribe or unsubscribe to an entire forum it should subscribe or unsubscribe all posts within that forum at that time. I haven’t tried adding code to fix this yet.

I suspect some bbpress templates could actually do this stuff for the second issue properly. Not sure if people even release new ones ever or not. It’s also possible that some themes could potentially already have their own bbpress templates which potentially could be broken or outdated causing issues.

[@rrhode Participant 10 years, 2 months ago]

Are you able to post the solution here? Or do you not know what it is exactly?

Oddly it will send any test notifications to me if I create replies on a post or within a forum I am subscribed to. It just seems to not work sometimes. I’m not entirely sure why yet but I haven’t had much time to dig into it yet but I do know that on most occasions in real situations I have not gotten any email notifications.

[@rrhode Participant 10 years, 2 months ago]

I have this issue as well and I am going to get to the bottom of it somehow or another and will post here when I find out the issue.

The plugins I have similar to OP are:
bbPress
Black Studio TinyMCE
GD bbPress Attachments