CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This is a followup to my prior post, but without the drama.

Say you'd like to automatically send a thank you email to all attendees of all your performances.  This is easy to do with event type "performance", status "attended", and a schedule for say 10hr after event end.

Unfortunately, this results in civi trying to "catch up" by sending emails to all attendees of all past performances.  This makes some sense, as the event type and status match the criteria, it is more than 10hr after the event, and no reminder has yet been sent.  That said, it is not such a good idea to send these out for events going back years.

It seems to me that if this feature is to be useful on anything other than a clean install, there needs to be some way to tell civi to start sending the emails for future events, but ignore all those past ones.  Perhaps instead of just "active", the reminder should be "active starting date X".  Or perhaps the filter for event type should also have an event start date filter.  Or maybe the schedule for sending emails should have a window.  As in "send an email X hours after the event, but not later than Y days after". 

For the short term, either using Event name and/or making all past events inactive might be a decent workaround

I can confirm that my system sent emails to attendees of events that had been disabled.  So your second suggestion won't work.

The general approach of putting a window on when reminders are sent without adding UI elements makes sense, particularly as a quick fix to help other folks avoid the nasty surprise of many unexpected emails going out.

However, I'm not sure X±1 is exactly right.  Mostly because the selectable units include hours, but the send scheduled reminders job defaults to daily.  Additionally, if the widow is 1 unit, and the job is run every 1 unit, there's a chance that any sort of cron hiccup would prevent the sending of desired reminders.

Seems to me that the window should be at least X±1.5.  Also, although it is a (small) UI change there should probably be a note or help text mentioning that the scheduled job should run at least as often as the units selected.

Ah.  That makes sense.