CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We've just updated to version 4.1 this morning. On every cron run, folks who are within the renewal reminder period are receiving the reminder email. Since cron runs 4 times an hour, one patron received the reminder email 24 times today! We are running the Membership reminder date processor and Membership status processor jobs; are these mutually exclusive? On the old individual cron jobs, one would overwrite the other and cause multiple reminders but I thought consolidated cron would fix this problem. What's the correct solution for this?

Ahh, I see. End users definitely aren't aware of the interaction between these two jobs and the problems it will cause. Now they're both in the UI, easy to turn on and are described in the UI in a way that Joe User will think he should turn on both of them. But this will cause huge problems for customer service as contacts get spammed with reminder emails.

I looked through the code and found the issue. The call to process_membership_reminder_date finds all memberships whose reminder date is NULL and sets a date for it, so a reminder will be sent when process_membership is run. However, process_membership finds all memberships that have a reminder date, sends the reminder if necessary, and then sets the reminder date back to NULL.

As you can see, this leads to an infinite loop of contacts receiving reminder emails; I think this is a bug since the new cron didn't remove the function for process_membership_reminder_date or account for reminders that were already sent. Is there a use case for process_membership_reminder_date to continue to exist, since adding and renewing memberships sets a reminder date? It seems that this job can only cause harm to unsuspecting users.

We just ran into this issue today. Luckily I heard it about from a good friend of our organization. I have never been so happy to have so few dues paying members...

So, I read through the documentation and I'm still a little unclear about when (if ever) process_membership_reminder_date should be run. Obviously it can't be run automatically. So when is it required to actually set the reminder dates from NULL?

Ahhh got it. I think the confusing part is that there seem to be a few scheduled jobs in the list that aren't actually supposed to be "scheduled". Semantically, they're more like maintenance tasks.

Thanks for clearing that up though!