Daily upgrade notification email

[liane]

Hi,

For a few days now (I guess that’s the date I reactivated the cron I accidentally deactivated), my WPMU installation has been sending me a daily email telling me that a new version of BPS Pro is available, but the installed version is 13.8, and looking at the version page, it is the current version.

No new versions are displayed in the WP upgrade section.

A funny thing is that the sending time is 13:37 every day

[AITpro Admin]

What type of cron are you using?  Is it the standard WordPress cron or are you using something like a direct cron?  Also go to the BPS Pro > Pro-Tools menu > Scheduled Cron tab page and post the time for the next bpsPro_update_check Hook.  Or if you want I would be glad login to your site and figure out what is going on.  If you want me to login to your site then send a WordPress Administrator login to:  info at ait-pro dot com.  I suspect that the cron you are using is overriding the BPS cron schedules.  Or it could be something else that is not obvious.  Everything looks fine with the BPS code that processes BPS update checks and no one else is reporting this problem.  So yeah most likely this is going to be some odd cron problem on your site.

[liane]

it is a system cron, I deactivated the WP cron with:

define( ‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true );

I created a super-admin login for you

[AITpro Admin]

Ok sounds good.  I’ll login as soon as I receive the login info.

[AITpro Admin]

Is the site Blogs SiteW3?  Just want to verify that before logging into the site.

[AITpro Admin]

I did not find the cause of the problem, but I’m pretty sure it is related to disabling WP Crons.  I tried a couple of things that might have taken care of the problem, but if you still receive BPS Pro upgrade email alerts then that leaves you with 3 options:  #1. Turn Off > BPS Pro Upgrade Notification email alerts on the BPS Pro > S-Monitor page or #2. Use standard WP Crons and don’t disable them or #3. Check that your system cron is setup to run at least once per minute and check that the system cron configuration is correct.

[liane]

Sorry, had to get away for lunch. I’ll do what you suggest and let you know, but it is not an urgent issue anyway.

For info: the cron script I use is this one (not sure it is of interest but who knows): https://bjornjohansen.no/wordpress-cron-wp-cli

[liane]

As for the 3 options:

#1: I don’t want to turn off notifications, I just want sensible notifications
#2: standard WP cron is unreliable, and I need to have a real cron job (mailing lists delivering)
#3: yes, my cronjob is set to run once per minute

[AITpro Admin]

Many years ago there were some issues with WP crons causing latency, but that changed a long time ago.  Someone else also sent me the same exact link a while back to that very old post on that website.  The post/article was written back in 2015 (4 years ago).  So really the optimum solution is to use standard WP Crons.  They are very efficient these days and you will avoid any headaches by using standard WP Crons instead of disabling them.  BPS Pro works fine with Direct Crons if you want to do that instead of using standard WP Crons, but in order for BPS Pro cron jobs to work accurately you would need to set the Direct cron to run once per minute.

[AITpro Admin]

I’m pretty sure this is no longer true for Network|Multisite sites:  But if you’re running a multisite network, you have to add a crontab entry for every site you set up – which is tedious.

[liane]

Well, I’m pretty sure the cron works ok, which is why I receive these notifications (just had my daily one a few minutes ago), and the script I’m using looks quite robust, using WP CLI.

But it is not a cron issue, the strange thing is I receive update notifications when the plugin is up-to-date.

One thing I noted is that the bpsPro_update_check job is set to run twice a day… but I only receive one notification

[AITpro Admin]

The twice daily scheduled event recurrence is using “twicedaily”, but it has an additional time restriction added to the cron schedule function that limits sending BPS Pro upgrade emails to once every 24 hours.  So that would not be a problem.  I think I saw that you have some sort of email notification plugin installed.  What could be happening is that the email notification plugin is somehow taking over/overriding the BPS Pro upgrade “twicedaily” cron schedule function.  Or maybe another plugin that you have installed is interfering with the BPS Pro upgrade “twicedaily” cron schedule function.

The only other possibility I can think of is the BPS Pro upgrade check function uses wp_remote_get() to check the current BPS Pro version on the ait-pro.com website and something on your website is interfering with the wp_remote_get() check.  Since this works for everyone else and no one else is reporting this problem then something you are using/have installed on your website is interfering with the BPS Pro upgrade “twicedaily” cron schedule function. If this was some sort of coding problem in BPS Pro then I would just change/fix the code. I can’t really think of anything I could change to make this work for your specific website since I’m not really sure what is causing the problem on your specific website.

Your original statement seems to point to the system cron as the cause of this problem > “For a few days now (I guess that’s the date I reactivated the cron I accidentally deactivated), my WPMU installation has been sending me a daily email telling me that a new version of BPS Pro is available…”, but it could be some sort of combination problem such as your system cron is causing another plugin to interfere with the BPS Pro upgrade “twicedaily” cron schedule function.

[liane]

Yes, the cron now working is only making the problem visible, which problem is BPS thinking the version is not ok.

How could I test the wp_remote_get() function on my side, so I could try to isolate some conflict?

[AITpro Admin]

Yeah I understand what you are saying, but this problem is only occurring on your website and not to anyone else. So what needs to be looked at is what is causing the problem for BPS Pro.

Do you receive BPS Pro upgrade notifications on your WordPress Plugins page?  If so, then you really do not need the additional BPS Pro upgrade check email.  That additional check was created for folks who do not receive a BPS Pro upgrade notification on the WordPress Plugins page due to either their web host blocking communication to our API server with a firewall or some other plugin blocking communication to our API server.

[liane]

Well, TBH, the upgrade notification of BPS has always been lazy at best, I always need to go back and forth between the plugins page and the update section to make it appear when there is one, and the “force plugin update check” doesn’t seem to do much to help.

So now, I’m starting to think these are all linked, if BPS has trouble to get the version with wp_remote_get() function, it is no surprise the update process has troubles too…

That’s why I’d like to isolate this problem, never said it was a bug in BPS though.

Do you think it be possible to have some little php script that does only call wp_remote_get() and display the result that I could use to test?

[Author]

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