Manage Subscriptions

**edub** · 2008-07-11, 04:32 PM

This is an FYI post - not a request for help, but it may be helpful for others to see.

We have a client that was having a couple issues with "Manage Subscriptions" procedure that you get to from a Contact record. This client is currently on 4.5.1f.

The client reported that for some newsletter campaigns they would drag a newsletter from the right column to the left column and hit save but that when the page refreshed it would be back on the right column again making them think it wasn't adding them to the newsletter. I found that it was adding them to the newsletter subscription list, it just wasn't showing that it had done it.

For this client I found two different reasons for this issue. One of the issues (which I am submitting as a bug) is that the utils.php page has a function that determines if they are on the newsletter list or not, but instead of searching by the unique identifier of the list it searches by the name of the list. This poses a problem if there are two lists that have the same name. In this clients case they had an old list that was flagged as inactive that wasn't being used with a newsletter and a new list with the same name as the old one that was assigned to the newsletter. If a user was on the correct list but not on the old list then the manage subscriptions drag and drop tool would think that they were not subscribed because it was searching to see if they were not subscribed to a list with that name. The specific line of code that has the issue is:
if(!array_key_exists($news_list['name'],$unsubs_arr))

I did not change the code to use the unique identifier because I didn't want to search the rest of the code to see if the issue resides elsewhere or not, so I just renamed the inactive list to have a different name.

That resolved one of the two newsletters that weren't working with the manage subscriptions list, but not the other. The issue with the other newsletter is that it has multiple lists associated with it that are of the default subscribe type. The utils.php function that determines which newsletters someone is subscribed to basically checks to see if there are any lists associated with a newsletter that is a subscribe list that a user isn't on, and if there is even one list that they are not on that is associated with a newsletter than it will show in the drag and drop tool that they are not on that newsletter.

For this client I am going to ask them not to use multiple lists with a newsletter anymore and just create a new list and merge all the others in to it. The client has basically a big list that is made up of all of their small lists for general company news that goes to all the sub-groups, but this is not ideal with the way the code is right now. I feel that the drag and drop tool needs to have its code adjusted to match the same logic that is used to send the newsletters to determine if they should or should not get the email.

I really don't like the idea that the drag and drop tool displays newsletters but manages lists. This is confusing because you could add someone to a newsletter which basically just picks a list associated with that newsletter and adds them to it, but that list could be associated with multiple newsletters which would actually add them to multiple newsletters. I'm not so sure I even like the idea of having multiple lists being able to be set to a single newsletter or that one list can be set to multiple newsletters, at least not as it is currently implemented.

I am considering displaying to the user all of the lists that they are on and then displaying what newsletters are associated with those lists. This should make it possible for the user to get the whole picture and be able to manage it better. It would also not be too hard for me to take that one step further to then show if they would receive email from that newsletter or not and if not then why not.

Anyways, the point is, if you have some problems with the Manage Subscriptions drag and drop tool, make sure that you don't have lists that have the same name and make sure that you don't have multiple subscribe lists associated to the same newsletter and see if that resolves your issues.

Eric

**bradym80** · 2008-07-15, 06:30 PM

A colleague of mine was just having the exact same problem on 5.0.0f. After dragging the newsletter into the subscription box, the change would not be reflected after saving. The contact was added to an arbitrary target list. The particular list he was added to was one our company uses for internal sensitive emails among employees! I am taking the thread starters advice and consolidating my lists used for this particular campaign.

**edub** · 2008-07-15, 09:44 PM

I found two more issues with this module today. I had said that my solution to the second item was to merge all the lists down to a single subscription list and then delete the association from the campaign and the old lists, however, while deleting that association makes it look like the list is no longer associated with the campaign, the code ignores the deleted=1 field and continues to think that they are associated with each other. Which means the only way to get the tool to recognize that the two items are no longer associated is to actually delete a row from prospect_list_campaign, although I believe there is a routine you can fire off from the admin area to clean out all the deleted records in your tables.

I also think that if there are two lists and one of them has been deleted that it still won't function correctly. So even though the list has been deleted you will have to rename the deleted list, or actually delete it from the database.

**se1269** · 2010-08-30, 12:30 PM

Hi,

I am having a similar problem (using Community Edition Version 5.5.0a (Build 6659)).
The subscription is working fine.

However, for some campaigns, the unsubscription (moving the campaign from left to right) appears to be "faulty".
While the campaign appear in the "Available/Newsletters Unsubscribed To" list, it also remains in the "Newsletters Subscribed To" one - leading the user that the unsubscription did not work.
You can see a sample in the attached image.

I did not find the answer in the thread. And I can't see any difference between the "working" and the "non-working" campaigns... Anybody else with the problems?