18 October 2012, 20:34

I'm using Mahara 1.4 since the beginning of this year hosted in-house on my organisations systems. For some strange reason Mahara has been sending spam notifications since the beginning of this week and I dont have a clue why it's doing this. I have had lots of other Mahara users with the same complaint.

Recently one of the IT guys assed another Task/cron job to update the server time which was falling out of sync with our Moodle install and having troubles single signing on because of the time different. Do you think this is related?

I removed the email server address to stop the messages being sent, but then I recieved another one right now. This will start to annoy the 900 odd users that are on Mahara very shortly.

Any ideas?

22 October 2012, 1:31

Hello Daniel,

What do you mean by "spam" messages? What sort of messages are sent? If you have random people who are not members of your institution sending messages and creating forum posts etc., you may want to disallow registration on the site (don't tick the check box for "Registration allowed" http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.4/site_admin/institutions.html#add-an-institution - #4 in the screenshot). Even if you do not accept these users into your institution, they still have an account. From Mahara 1.5 on there is an additional setting, Confirm registration, which prevents this behavior. Since you are connecting to Moodle, there may not be a reason for allowing registration unless you want to allow your users to move to another institution within Mahara or be able to delete their own accounts.

If you suddently receive messages that are legitimite, e.g. messages from other users, forum post notifications etc. that you hadn't received before, your cron settings might just have started to work.

Cheers

Kristina

22 October 2012, 21:38

Hi Kristina,

thank you for the reply.  After a long labour weekend of testing I've sorted it.

The problem was Mahara cron and another scheduled task to reset Mahara server time so that our Moodle and Mahara servers are in synch were getting in the way of each other and the Mahara cron job was thinking it hadn't run yet so was sending duplicate notifications.

Just had to tweak scheduling of each job so that they wouldn't get in the way of each other.

Cheers
Dan

27 October 2012, 19:24

Hi Dan,

Great that you found a solution and thanks for posting it for others to find.

Cheers

Kristina