Comment notifications no longer being sent out automatically

[bobinoz]

I mentioned this problem originally at the end of #317 when I commented on 10 Aug. I also detailed this same problem a couple of months ago in the WordPress support thread for the plug-in, which you can see here...

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/has-stopped-working-5/

I am still desperate for help with this. I have had to manually process all comment notifications for the last two months now, it really isn't much fun with over 5000 subscriptions in the system.

Prior to 5 July this year comment notifications were being sent out automatically at a rate of about 20 every 20 minutes. After that date, comment notifications stopped automatically being sent, other than a small handful by the real-time queue processor.

On 5 July I updated WordPress to 4.9.7 and also my Thesis theme from 2.6.1 to 2.6.4. As nobody else seems to be having this problem, I suspect it isn't WordPress, but I did think it might be Thesis. I have contacted the developer, and he tells me there is absolutely nothing in the changelogs in those versions that could possibly affect the way Comment Mail works.

He asked me for information about the specific hooks or filters this Plugin relies upon to send out cron-related things and after I answered his question, he came back with another question which I'm hoping one of the developers here can answer. Here's what he said...

"The comment_form hook appears in the Thesis Comment Form Box. If this Box appears in your template, then Comment Mail will work.

But I think we have a semantic issue here that has nothing to do with code.

Comment Mail devs are talking about a TEMPLATE, but you're talking about a CRON.

A template runs when it's called upon.

A cron job is supposed to run at intervals on your site, and this needs to happen independent of all other variables (such as which template is displaying).

Can you ask Comment Mail how they expect a cron to run if the cron is attached to a template hook? That makes absolutely zero sense to me.

The cron should "just work" if the Plugin is activated, and I simply don't understand how a cron could be hooked into a template."

.................

I don't understand it either, but I do hope that somebody here can help me fix this. Thanks in advance, Bob (site = bobinoz.com)